The Oxford American Winter 2015

JAMES BROWN j SHARON JONES | FLETCHER HENOERSON j MA RAINEY | LITTLE RICH ARC i INOIGO GIRLS

JANELLE MONAE’S

PETER GURALNICK

PALLS INTO
THE BLUES

KIESE
LAYMON ON

mouDLV rvBLisHKO rROM the univbhsitv or cehtral aeeansas

OXFORD

AMANDA

PETRUSICH

HEARS THE

OUTKASrS

SOUTHERN ALLMAN

STANK AMERICAN ★ BROTHERS

A MAGAZINE OP THE SOUTH

SOUTHERN

MUSIC

ISSUE

Featuring

GEORGIA

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WINTER 2015

GEORGIA ON MY MIND

LISTENING

10 The Music of Georgia
Editors’ Note

18 There’s nobody like Blind Willie McTell
hy Peter Guralnick

23 The moony lyricism of Johnny Mercer

hy John Ling an

27 Pondering the Indigo Girls, awaiting clarity
by Jamie Quatro

28 DA ART OF STORYTELLIN'

(A PREQUEL)

OutKast’s Southern stank
by Kiese Laymon

FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

INNOVATION

36 Gram Parsons’s prophetic Nudie suit
hy Elyssa East

39 The Skillet bickers’ pickin’ picnic
by Greg Reish

44 MG Shy D, an original ATLien
by Will Stephenson

50 Thomas A. Dorsey unites gospel and blues
hyDom Flemons

54 THE ROAD GOES ON FOREVER

The Allman Brothers’ wild South
by Amanda Petrusich

THE DIRTY SOUTH

SCENES

64 Savannah, metal, and mourning
hy Bill Dawers

67 Hip-hop and black history in Albany
hy Regina N. Bradley

71 Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn soul
hy Brian Poust

76 WHEN THE FIRE BROKE OUT

Life and death in Cabbagetown
hy Abigail Covington

ATHENS X ATHENS

84 Featuring David Barbe, Art Rosenbaum,

Patterson Hood, and many others

ENLIGHTENED ROGUES

LEGENDS

104 Galling Little Richard

hy David Ramsey

109 Beverly “Guitar” Watkins at seventy-six
hy Rachael Maddux

114 Bessie Jones, vision and voice
hy Nathan Salsburg

115 In defense of Dave Prater

hy Jonathan Bernstein

122 Fiddlin’ John Carson’s darkest murder ballad
by Christopher C. King

127 Ray Stevens remembers a comedy song

by Jewly High t

132 SUGARFOOT STOMP

The genius of Fletcher Henderson
by Cynthia Shearer

OH, MAKER

VISIONARIES

142 Rico Wade’s Dungeon Family reunion
hy Rodney Carmichael

148 Sharon Jones comes home
hy Maxwell George

154 In the cosmic mind of Col. Bruce Hampton
by Lance Ledbetter

156 Killer Mike turns forty
hy Austin L. Ray

160 Janelle Monae looks toward the future
hy Brit Bennett

162 AN UNFINISHED STATE

Dust-to-DigitaTs unheard magnum opus
by Wyatt Williams

POETRY

25 Upbringing by William Wright

47 Talking Drum # 1 by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

69 Tar Road by Nick Norwood

139 Elegy for an Accordion by Chelsea Rathburn

165 The Summer Archivist hyA.E. Stallings

175 SONG CREDITS

Copyright © 2015 The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc. All rights reserved. The Oxford American (ISSN 1074-4525, DSPS# 023157)
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Radcliffe Bailey, Allison V Smith, Chris Verene, Seth Fountain, Terry Rowlett, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, Vernon Thornsberry,
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■ 5 -

CONTRI BUTORS

DAVID B ARB E has worked as a musician,
songwriter, engineer, and producer with
Sugar, Drive-By Truckers, Deerhunter, Son
Volt, Bettye LaVette, R.E.M., k.d. lang, and
many others. He directs the University of
Georgia Music Business Program.

BRIT BENNETT lives in Los Angeles.
Her debut novel. The Mothers, is forthcoming
from Riverhead Books.

JONATHAN BERNSTEIN is a writer
and fact checker in New Tbrk. His work has
appeared in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, SPIN,
Vice, and American Songwriter.

REGINA N. BRADLEY is an assistant
professor of African-American literature at
Armstrong State University in Savannah.

She is working on her first book. Chronicling
Stankonia, about hip-hop in the South.

RODNEY CARMICHAEL grewupin
Decatur, Georgia. He’s an award-winning
senior staff writer for the Atlanta

alt-weekly Creative Loafing. Follow him on
Twitter at @ Rodney ology.

ABIGAIL COVINGTON grewupin
North Carolina. Her work has appeared in the
A.V. Club ind Consequence of Sound.

BILL DAWERS is a columnist for the
Savannah Morning News. He teaches at
Armstrong State University.

ELYSSA EAST is the author of Do^toww.’
Death and Enchantment in a New England
Ghost Town. An eighth-generation Georgian,
she teaches writing at New Tbrk University.

DOM FLEMONS was a founding member
of the Grammy Award-winning Carohna
Chocolate Drops. He has released three solo
albums: Prospect Hill; Dance Tunes, Ballads
and Blues; and American Songster.

MAXWELL GEORGE is the Oxford
American's managing editor.

PETER GURALNICK’s books include
the two-volume biography of Elvis Presley,
Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love;
Sweet Soul Music; and Dream Boogie: The
Triumph of Sam Cooke. His biography Sam

Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’Roll,
has just been published by Little, Brown.

JEWLY HIGHT is the author of
by Her Roots: Americana Women and Their
Songs. Bom in North Carohna and raised in
Florida, she writes and clogs in NashviUe.

PATTERSON HOOD is a recording
artist best known as a member of Drive-By
Truckers, who just released a career-spanning
35-song live box set. He recently published a
New York Times op-ed about the Confederate
flag controversy.

HONORED FANONNE JEFFERS is

the author of four books of poetry, including
The Glory Gets. She grew up in North
Carolina and her ancestral home of Georgia,
but since 2002 has lived on the prairie. She
teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

CHRISTOPHER C. KING produces
collections of old music through his studio.
Long Gone Sound Productions, in Virginia.
His book. Lament from Epirus, is forthcoming
from WW Norton. His compilation Why the
Mountains Are Black: Primeval Greek Village
Music, 1907-1960 will be available from
Third Man Records in 2016.

- 6 -

WINTER 2015

“Liberty Hill Church, Barncsville, Georgia,” by Johnathon Kelso

OXFORD

•AMERICAN •

ELIZA BORNE
Editor

Managing Editor MAXWELL GEORGE
Senior Editor JAY JENNINGS
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Art Researcher ALYSSA COPPELMAN

Editorial Interns

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Columnists JOHN T. EDGE, CHRIS OFFUTT
Editor at Large ROGER D. HODGE
Contributing Editors

LUCY ALIBAR, ROY BLOUNT, JR., WENDY BRENNER,

ICEVIN BROCKMEIER, WILLIAM CAVERLEE, MARGARET CORDI,
BRONWEN DICKEY, LOLIS ERIC EUE, NATALIE ELLIOTT,

BETH ANN FENNELLY, LESLIE JAMISON, HARRISON SCOTT ICEY,
ALEX MAR, GREIL MARCUS, DUNCAN MURRELL,

AMANDA PETRUSICH, PADGETT POWELL, JAMIE QUATRO,

DIANE ROBERTS, MARK WINEGARDNER

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ABOUT US

The Oxford American is a nonprofit quarterly
published by The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc.,
in alhance with the University of Central Arkansas (UCA).

KIESE LAYMON is the author
of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and
Others in America and Long Division.

A professor at Vassar College, he
is currently the Grisham Writer-
in-Residence at the University of
Mississippi.

LANCE LEDBETTER and
APRIL LEDBETTER own the

Grammy Award-winning label Dust-
to-Digital. Their latest release, a
collaboration with record collector Joe
Bussard, is The Year of Juhilo: 78 RPM
Recordings of Songs from the Civil War.

JOHN LINGAN’sworkhas
appeared in the Virginia Quarterly
Review, the Baffler, and BuzzFeed.

RACHAEL MADDUX lives in
Atlanta. Her Oxford American piece
“Hail Dayton” was included in Best
American Travel Writing 2015.

NICK NORWOOD s most recent
volume. Gravel and Hawk, won the
Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. He
teaches at Columbus State University
and directs the Carson McCullers
Center for Writers and Musicians.

AMANDA PETRUSICH is the

author of three books about music,
including Do Not Sell at Any Price:

The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the
World’s Rarest 78rpm Records. She is
a professor of writing at New "'fork
University

BRIAN POUST is a researcher,
writer, and collector who maintains a
growing archive of Georgia soul music.

JAMIE QUATRO is the author of
the story collection 1 Want to Show You
More. Her second collection and novel
are forthcoming from Grove Press.

DAVID RAMSEY’s work has been
anthologized in Da Capo Best Music
Writing, Best Food Writing, Cornbread
Nation: The Best of Southern Food
Writing, and the Norton Field Guide to
Writing. He lives in Nashville.

CHELSEA RATHBURN is the

author of two books of poetry, A Raft
of Grief and The Shifting Line. She lives

in the mountains of North Georgia,
where she directs the creative writing
program at Tbung Harris Gollege.

AU S T I N L . R A Y has written for
Creative Loafing, Rolling Stone, and
Good Beer Hunting, among other
publications. He lives in Atlanta.

GREG REISH, a native of Atlanta,
is a musician, musicologist, and the
director of the Genter for Popular
Music at Middle Tennessee State
University. His album with fiddler
Matt Brown, Speed of the Plow, was
released in October.

ART ROSENBAUM is a Grammy
Award-winning folklorist, painter, and
musician. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

NATHAN SALSBURGisa

guitarist, producer, and the curator of
the Alan Lomax Archive. His latest
album is Ambsace, featuring guitar
duets with James Elkington.

CYNTHIA SHEARER is the

author of two novels. The Wonder Book
of the Air and The Celestial Jukebox.
Formerly a curator of Faulkner’s home
in Oxford, Mississippi, she now
teaches at Texas Christian University.

A. E. STALLINGS grewup in
Decatur, Georgia, studied classics in
Athens, Georgia, and now lives in
Athens, Greece. A MacArthur fellow,
her most recent collection is Olives.

Her verse translation of Lucretius, The
Nature of Things, has been reissued in
hardback by Penguin Classics.

WILL STEPHENSON is the

culture editor of the Arkansas Times.
His writing has also appeared in the
FADER, Pacific Standard, and the
Los Angeles Review of Books.

WYATT WILLIAMS lives and
writes in Atlanta. He is currently at
work on a book about meat.

WILLIAM WRIGHT is the

author of four books of poetry, most
recently Tree Heresies and Night Field
Anecdote. He is the assistant editor of
Shenandoah and makes his home in
Marietta, Georgia.

OxfordAmerican.org

- 7 -

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— LISTENING —

ON MY MIND

W elcome to the Oxford American’s seventeenth music issue, in which we take on the task of
excavating, cataloguing, chronicling, appreciating, and celebrating the musical traditions of
Georgia. From country blues and early jazz to gospel, soul, metal, rock & roll, hip-hop, and
beyond — there isn’t a corner of American music the people of this state haven’t made their own. Within
this magazine and on the CD, we have gathered some of their stories, in hopes of illuminating a bit of
Georgia’s musical past, present, and future. We suggest you start here, with track one.

The Music
of Georgia

i.“COLD SWEAT
(FALSE START)”

James Brown

★★★★★★*★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★*
The precise origins of new genres are gener-
ally matters of debate. When jazz emerged in
New Orleans, Buddy Bolden was the most
innovative cornet player in town, but it’s gen-
erous to give him sole credit for creating the
form. The Sex Pistols had a hand in popular-
izing punk, but they were standing on the
shoulders of countless groups before them.
Let’s not even approach the perpetual rock &
roll negotiations. There is, however, at least
one clean exception to the rule: James Brown
invented funk.

This is a remarkable achievement, given
the relative simplicity of the recipe: a driving
rhythm with emphasis on the one beat, a reli-
able hook, r&b instrumentation. “Cold Sweat,”
written in 1967 with bandleader Pee Wee Ellis,
is among Brown’s greatest compositions, and
also one of his most basic. At the height of his
powers. Brown seemed to be tapping an inex-
haustible wellspring of funky inspiration, and
he wrote on the fly, often hustling his band,
the inimitable J.B.’s, into a studio in whatever
town they happened to be in. In this “false start”
from sessions at King Studios in Cincinnati, we
are granted a glimpse at Brown’s process and
his famous perfectionism. The engineer labels
the take. Brown counts it off, and the band
sets in flawlessly. But immediately the mae-
stro hears some imperceptible slack and stops
them, in unison, at the top of the next bar. With
his God-given instruments (hands, mouth) he
communicates the precise message ca[\ei funk.

Before then, no one had heard music quite
like this, including the J.B.’s. Thereafter, no one
would be able to shake this new sound. James
Brown was both the medium and the architect,
the prophet and the divine in one body. And
while Brown certainly didn’t invent hip-hop,

he’s a worthy subject in that conversation, too,
because of beats like this one.

2 . “WATCH THE DOG

THAT BRING THE BONE”

Sandy Gaye

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Georgia’s soul and r&b legacy is crowded
with stars; it is staggering to consider that Otis
Redding, Little Richard, James Brown, Ray
Charles, Sam & Dave, and Gladys Knight shared
the same home state. But in the sixties and sev-
enties, there was a lesser-known homegrown
scene in Atlanta that produced a wealth of deep
soul numbers that speak for themselves, when
given the chance.

Numero Group’s 2008 compilation Eccen-
tric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels is an entry
point — you’ll find cut after cut of high qual-
ity, overlooked Atlanta funk and soul. The
fiery blaster “Watch the Dog That Bring the
Bone” (1969), written by Richard Marks and
Bill Wright, arranged by trumpeter Tommy
Stewart, and performed by Sandy Gaye, is argu-
ment enough for paying attention to Georgia’s
“second-tier” soul arena.

WINTER 2015

3. “OHOOPEE RIVER
BOTTOMLAND”

Larry Jon Wilson

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

In November 1975, Graham Leader and

James Szalapski, inspired by the Outlaw coun-
try movement in Nashville, got an idea for a
film. It would be a non-narrated documentary
about their favorite singer-songwriters, star-
ring the music itself. They began filming less
than a month later. On day one, they booked
studio time in Nashville and invited a musician
to cut a song live on tape. It was a risky set-
piece scene, and they were nervous. And then
the musician didn’t show. They called around.
They tracked him down in a distant hotel, where
Leader roused him from bed and got him coffee
and scrambled eggs on the way to the session.

The songwriter was one of the very best:
Larry Jon Wilson from Augusta, a purveyor
of country -funk with a swampy baritone and
deep pride for his Georgia roots. The film is
called Heartworn Highways, and it’s now a classic

artifact of Americana. His take that day became
the opening scene: after the credits roll over
Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway,” Wilson is shown
in the studio working up a new version of his
traveling song “Ohoopee River Bottomland,”
about a prodigal son of Georgia. As the last
notes fade out, Larry Jon gives his stamp of
approval — “Oh, hell yeah.”

4. “BRASS BUTTONS”

Gram Parsons

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

Gram Parsons’s album Grievous Angel was

released four months after his death at age twenty-
six from an overdose of morphine and alcohol,
which makes the song “Brass Buttons” all the
more heartbreaking. Parsons wrote it after his
mother. Avis, died from cirrhosis. In a painfully
intimate portrait, he remembers her life and
mourns her absence. “The sun comes up without
her, ” he sings in a clear, melancholy voice. “It just
doesn’t know she’s gone. ” Grievous An^e/features

Emmylou Harris as a guest vocalist on every song
but one. “Brass Buttons” is Gram alone, his lyri-
cism on full display and his grief laid bare.

5. “SEE SEE RIDER BLUES”

Ma Rainey & Her Georgia Jazz Band
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey grew up poor in Co-
lumbus, Georgia, along the Ghattahoochee
River. Both parents were singers, and by her
teens she was performing with traveling min-
strel shows. Her deep voice could be rough
and her range was limited, but Ma Rainey had
an undeniable presence onstage, wearing gold
caps on her teeth, gaudy jewelry, and peacock
feathers in her hair. In an era dominated by slick
and glamorous female vocalists, Rainey brought
the red dirt of country blues to the glittering
popular music of the moment.

On “See See Rider Blues,” recorded for
Paramount in New %rk in October 1924, her
revolving Georgia Jazz Band was at its finest.

“1200 meditations, things my mother gave me,” by Cecil McDonald Jr.

OxfordAmerican.org

with Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Green, Buster
Bailey, Charlie Dixon, and a fledging hot comet
player named Louis Armstrong. This is the origi-
nal recording of an American standard — covered
by Elvis, Ray Charles, the Grateful Dead, and
countless others. It s a traditional song, but the
credits rightfully bear her name : Ma Rainey, the
Mother of the Blues.

6. “GEORGIA BUCK”

Precious Bryant

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
In 1969, the Atlanta folklorist George Mitch-
ell came to Waverly Hall, a tiny town near Co-
lumbus, to record, in his later words, a “Georgia
musical treasure.” Precious Bryant, a flnger-style
guitarist and blues singer in the Piedmont tradi-
tion, was twenty-seven years old. Her signature
song was “Georgia Buck,” an instrumental based
loosely on early country recording artist Sam
McGee s “Buck Dancer’s Choice,” which Bryant
had learned from her father.

This rendition was captured at her home in
Talbotton in 2007 by Neil Rosenbaum and his
father. Art, for Neil’s excellent documentary
film Sing My Troubles By: Visits with Georgia
Women Carrying Their Musical Traditions into
the 21st Century. Precious Bryant died in 2013
at seventy-one.

and learning, and coming up with music that
takes us to a deep place in the American spirit.”

8 . “UNTITLED”

Killer Mike (featuring Scar)
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
In 2012, Killer Mike released R.A.P. Music, a
no-holds-barred assault on complacency, preju-
dice, American history, and the rap music es-
tablishment. The acronym in the title stands for
Rebellious African People.

“Untitled” features Terrence “Scar” Smith, a
songwriter, vocalist, and associate of Atlanta’s
Dungeon Family collective, whose voice can
also be heard on tracks from stars like OutKast
and Janelle Monae. Over a beat engineered by
El-P, his soon-to-be partner in the duo Run
the Jewels, Killer Mike confronts a harrowing
prospect: that any famous, outspoken black man
must grapple with the threat of his own assas-
sination. He raps with appropriate abandon,
making preparations for a future he may not
live to witness, as if this were his last chance
to claim allegiances and define his platform.
Streetwise and bookish, weaving in references
both overtly political and intentionally obscure,
this is Killer Mike’s great anthem, the song he
would have us remember him by.

7. “RAGGY LEVY”

Jake Xerxes Fussell

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
As the son of folklorist Fred Fussell, Jake
Xerxes Fussell grew up in Columbus awash in
the vernacular music of the South, and of Georgia
in particular. His father often took him on field-
work missions, canvassing the rural Southeast
for unheard music with George Mitchell and Art
Rosenbaum, absorbing his seniors’ shared curios-
ity and enthusiasm for traditional music. Jake took
up the guitar at a young age and studied under
his father’s friend Precious Bryant. Eventually,
he took a degree in the famous Southern Stud-
ies program at the University of Mississippi. In
2015, Jake Fussell released his first album, which
showcases a singular combination of pedigree,
experience, education, and talent. The album’s
source list (from Bryant to Uncle Dave Macon)
is a syllabus unto itself.

“Raggy Levy” is taken from Doug and Frankie
Quimby of Brunswick, Georgia, associates of
Bessie Jones, whose own version with the Sea
Island Singers was recorded by Alan Lomax in
1960. Rosenbaum notes, “Jake is still listening

9.“l WANT THE LORD TO DO
SOMETHING FOR ME”

Evangelist Hattie Finney & the

Straight Street Holiness Church Choir
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Recently, at a flea market in Canton, Georgia,
Deerhunter’s lead singer, Bradford Cox, came
across a gospel 45 by a group he’d never heard of.
The plain yellow label looked hke a self-release
and bore an address in Fort VaUey, near Macon.
Cox bought it for five cents. He then took it to
his friend in Atlanta, the gospel aficionado Lance
Ledbetter, who was familiar with the Straight
Street Holiness Church but had never heard
these particular songs. The A-side was “I Want
the Lord to Do Something for Me,” credited to
Rev. Milton Phelps with Evangehst Hattie Finney
on lead vocal. Ledbetter was immediately struck.

According to Jeannette Finney, daughter of
Evangelist Hattie, who led the church for more
than fifty years , the recordings were made in the
mid-seventies. Still, as an amplified gospel the
song is dated to a specific period, just after the
introduction of the electric guitar, in the forties,
when preachers plugged in at church. This was
the music-centric brand of worship that Little

Richard and James Brown must have grown up
hearing in Macon and Augusta.

Jeannette says she connects with her mother,
who died in the late 1990s, through music: “All
the way through it’s spiritual, and she was a very
spiritual woman.” Hattie Finney began preach-
ing in traveling tent revivals at age nineteen
before establishing the Straight Street Holiness
Church in Fort Valley. On this recording, we
hear Rev. Phelps’s crude guitar pattern create a
droning bottom over which Hattie Finney leads
the choir, from behind her drum set. It is divine
providence put to song, at once a fervent call for
God’s guidance and a passionate submission to
His love: “I need the Lord to do something for
me. I want the Lord to do something for me.”

10 . “SWEET PICKING TIME
IN TOOMSBORO, GA .”

Tut Taylor (with Norman Blake)

Robert Arthur “Tut” Taylor, who died last
April at age ninety-one, grew up in a community
called Possum Trot by Georgia’s Oconee River. It
appears on no map. Left to his own devices, young
Tut developed an idiosyncratic flat-picking style
on the Dobro, which slowed him down at first
but then allowed him to cultivate a deliberate,
now highly acclaimed style. In the early 1970s,
he flourished alongside the guitarist Norman
Blake, another Georgia-bred bluegrass legend.
Blake was from his own speck across the state
called Sulphur Springs — the kind of place where
a boy can fit in a lot of pickin’ practice.

By the time Taylor and Blake crossed paths in
Nashville, theirs were the hottest hands in the
business, and when they each started recording
proper albums of their own songs, they did so
with one another’s backing. “Sweet Picking Time
in Toomsboro, Ga.,” a blistering instrumental
number from Taylor’s 1972 album Briar Tut, is
emblematic of their exchange. As the last notes
ring out and then fade, you can almost see the
men leaning away from the flame of shared
concentration, grinning over a take they knew
was in the bag.

11. “AIN’T NO CHIMNEYS
IN THE PROJECTS”

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Representations of Christmas are among

the more narrow images still proffered to our
popular consciousness, a homogenous, bygone
ideal of an America that never spoke for us all.

WINTER 2015

Augusta native Sharon Jones is hardly a politi-
cal musician, but she is an emotional one, and
this story of youthful innocence meeting blunt
grown-up reality can serve as an effective protest
of exclusive holiday perceptions.

“When I was a child 1 used to wonder how
Santa put my toys under the tree,” Jones sings.
“1 said, ‘Momma can you tell me how this can
be, when there ain’t no chimneys in the proj-
ects?’” Sharon Jones isn’t the first artist to voice
this sentiment. For instance, in 1994, OutKast
rapped: “Ain’t no chimneys in the ghetto, so 1
won’t be hanging my socks.”

A couple months ago, Sharon Jones & the
Dap-Kings released It’s a Holiday Soul Party, a
collection of originals and funked-up classics,
including their own “8 Days (of Hanukkah)”
and the best rendition of “Little Drummer Boy”
we’ve ever heard. Now, here is a holiday tradi-
tion that everyone can get down to!

12. “THE LIVING BUBBA” (LIVE)

Drive-By Truckers

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
In an age when rock & roll done in the classic
mode can seem passe (or more often just bad).

Drive-By Truckers, now in their twentieth
year, have provided a consistent reminder that
to “turn your demons into goddamn walls of
noise and sound” remains a worthwhile pursuit.
The Southern rock monster is led by Patterson
Hood and Mike Cooley, with whatever third
singing, songwriting, shredding compatriot
can cut the mustard next to the two of them
(Rob Malone, Jason Isbell, and Shonna Tucker
each contributed gamely in their stints with
the band). Though Hood and Cooley were both
raised in North Alabama, where they played
together in Adam’s House Cat, DBT has been
based in Athens, Georgia, from the beginning.

Hood has called “The Living Bubba,” from
their first album, 1998’s Gangstahilly, the best
song he’s written. (That’s a tall order.) Penned
in homage to the Atlanta musician Gregory
Dean Smalley, who succumbed to AIDS when
Drive-By Truckers was just getting together
in the nineties, “The Living Bubba” tells the
unadorned story of an artist facing a slow death
and making music until his final breath. This
version appears on DBT’s latest album. It’s Great
to Be Alive, recorded over three nights last year
at the Fillmore in San Francisco. “I keep on liv-
ing just to bend that note in two,” Hood sings

on the final chorus, before Cooley joins him in
a harmony almost three decades in the making:
“And I can’t die now, ’cause I got another show. ”

13. “AWAKE” Smoke
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Atlanta’s Smoke is frequently likened to

Tom Waits — an understandable comparison
thanks to lead singer Benjamin’s gravelly vo-
cals — though we prefer this simple declaration
from singer-songwriter Kelly Hogan: “Smoke
is the sound of Cabbagetown to me.” What a
mesmerizing and melancholy sound that is, self-
described by the band as “the queer Southern
blues.” Among many others. Smoke influenced
fellow Cabbagetown musician Chan Marshall
(better known as Cat Power), and after Benja-
min’s early death in 1999, he was memorialized
in Patti Smith’s song “Death Singing.”

On “Awake,” comet and cello provide a beau-
tiful counterpoint to Benjamin’s aching ballad of
desolation, which contains the sobering wisdom
of a man who understood his days were num-
bered. “%u don’t want it tomorrow if you’ve
gotittoday,” Benjamin warns. “Tomorrow never
happens anyway.”

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14. “THE WINTER IS COMING”

Elf Power

By the turn of the new millennium, the
Elephant 6 Recording Company was an estab-
lished institution, a mysterious band of mer-
rymakers emanating psychedelic lo-fi indie rock
from the woods outside of Athens. With 1998 s
In the Aeroplane over the Sea, Jeff Mangum s
Neutral Milk Hotel had transcended the popular
chasm and assumed the pubhc face of the opera-
tion, an uncomfortable burden that would soon
undo that band and, ultimately, the collective it-
self. But before the recognition arrived. Elephant
6 was just a bunch of creative friends making
music together. Mangum s many collaborators
peopled a variety of cross-pollinating bands,
including the Olivia Tremor Control, Apples
in Stereo, of Montreal, and the anonymous all-
hands production known as Major Organ and
the Adding Machine.

Elf Power, formed in 1 994 by Andrew Rieger
and Laura Carter, was at the center of the col-
lective, and as Neutral Milk Hotel voluntarily
faded, they rose. “The Winter Is Coming,” from
the 2000 album by that name, captures both the
wildly fun, collaborative spirit of Elephant 6
and Elf Powers own particular craftsmanship.
The band went on to collaborate with Athens’s
greatest songwriter, Vic Chesnutt, and Carter
and Rieger formed Orange Twin Records to raise
funds to estabhsh a conservation community. Elf
Power is still creating strange, imaginative music,
mostrecently with 201 3’s Sunlight on the Moon.

15. “TRIED TO BE TRUE”

Indigo Girls (with R.E.M.)

Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met in elementary
school in Decatur, Georgia, and started playing
together in high school. They formed the B-Band
while at Emory University before rechristening
themselves the Indigo Girls in 1985. Thirty years
later, the beloved folk-rock duo has released six-
teen studio albums — most recently. One Lost Day
last June — and they are known as much for their
activism as for their intensely personal lyrics and
interwoven vocals.

Their self-titled 1989 album won the Grammy
for Best Contemporary Folk Album and includes
the classics “Closer to Fine” and “Kid Fears,”
which features vocals by Michael Stipe. His fel-
low R.E.M. band members Bill Berry, Mike Mills,
and Peter Buck join in on “Tried to Be True,”
which Amy leads in her ferocious alto. Though
“Tried to Be True” is more rock song than ballad.

it takes but a brief introduction to the band to un-
derstand why New York Tirnescuxxc Neil Strauss
once wrote that in their early duets, Amy and
Emily “could delve into winning harmonies and
energetically pick their guitars in counterpoint
as if connected by an invisible bond.”

16. “POTTER’S ¥ lELD” Alice Swoboda
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
When she answered an Atlanta newspaper
advertisement seeking songwriters in the early
1970s, Alice Swoboda did not intend to perform
her own material. Thankfully, the producer Jesse
Jones recognized her talents and convinced Swo-
boda (nee Harper — she took her stage name from
a New %rk Mets outfielder) to record four sides
before she grew disenchanted with performing.

The haunting ballad “Potter’s Field” is a mas-
terwork, blending aspects of soul, r&b, jazz, and
folk. Swoboda still lives in Atlanta and continues
to write music, though strictly for her own en-
tertainment. “I’m always going to have a guitar
somewhere nearby,” she tells us, but she has no
interest in recording again. “My heartbeat is for
the homeless, the hopeless, the helpless.”

17. “DIAMOND JOE” Bessie Jones

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

In 1935 , the New York folklorists Alan Lomax
and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle met Zora Neale
Hurston in Florida and the trio embarked on
a three-week fieldwork trip. They ended up in
Georgia’s Sea Islands, where they encountered
an extraordinary shouting strain of gospel music
in practice by the isolated black community
there. When Lomax returned to St. Simons
Island in 1959, he met Bessie Jones, a histo-
rian, storyteller, educator, and singer who was
compelled to carry the old traditions forward.
Though she preferred to sing in a group, her
unaccompanied voice is stunning, as evidenced
on “Diamond Joe.” Lomax made hours of record-
ings, and helped Jones spread knowledge of
the Sea Island tradition through staged perfor-
mances around the country. She died in 1984,
but the oral history she left behind, in song and
story, wdl ensure that Jones’s mission carries on,
if not in practice, at least in spirited memory.

18. “AS BAD AS I AM”

Ruby the RabbitFoot
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Athens artist Ruby the RabbitFoot’s music
was described by American Songwriter ns “sug-

ary vocals dunked in black coffee lyrics.” Ruby
herself has called her sound “three-quarters va-
nilla.” Whatever flavor she brings to mind (rock
candy?), her 2014 debut. New as Dew, is one
of our favorite pop albums in recent memory,
with catchy melodies delivered in a crystal-
line voice that often belies dark messages about
the complications of romantic love. Raised on
St. Simons Island, Ruby the RabbitFoot took
her professional name because of superstition.
“Attaching that kind of thing to yourself can’t
hurt,” she’s said by way of an explanation. “As
Bad as I Am” is a veiled take on that most basic
pop preoccupation: unrequited love. You can
almost hear the tongue in her cheek.

19. “I’VE GOT DREAMS
TO REMEMBER
(ROUGHER DREAMS)”

Otis Redding

What is left to say about this man from Daw-
son, Georgia, who didn’t live to see twenty-
seven, yet managed to so profoundly influence
the landscape of American music? Otis Redding
was an excellent songwriter and a wonderful
performer, but we enshrine him most of all
for his staggering emotional fluency. Redding’s
voice had a primal rawness, and he used it to
convey the essence of heartache, ecstasy, de-
sire, and joy. He could wholly inhabit planes
of feeling at will, for a few minutes at a time.
In this moody outtake of his posthumous hit
“I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” — a version
referred to as “Rougher Dreams” for its darker
lyrics — we get despair. It is the only song he
cowrote with his wife, Zelma, based on a poem
she wrote while he was away on tour. It sounds
like it hurt coming out.

20. “AQUEMINI” OutKast

This past September, the New York Times
put the twenty-four-year-old rapper Young
Thug on the cover of its annual Fall Arts Pre-
view section. The writer discussed his consistent
self-reinvention and declared him hip-hop’s
“most challenging and thrilling” artist. What
wasn't mentioned is that Young Thug hails from
Atlanta. Because why would it be? Many of the
genre’s great innovators have come out of the
ATL; it’s the epicenter of the hip-hop universe.

The omission would have been unimaginable
twenty years ago, when New York Gity and Los
Angeles were the only known galaxies in that

WINTER 2015

sky. Then something shifted: OutKast hap-
pened — and their emergence was as monumen-
tal to the genre as Copernicus to astronomy.

“ Aquemini” is the title track from OutKast s
seminal third album, released in 1998. By this
point, the duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000 had
established their Georgia roots (Southernplayal-
isticadillacmuzik, 1994) and their otherworldly
ambitions [ATLiens, 1 996) under the guidance
of the Atlanta production trio Organized Noize.
With Aquemini, knowing that they were only
as funky as their last cut (“You focus on the past,
your ass’ll be a has what”). Big and Dre took on
more of the production duties and achieved their
purest vision as a duo. “For Southern music,
period, it meant nothing was the same,” Killer
Mike told XXL magazine in 2013. “Aquemini
progressed our music twenty years.”

The song itself is an object lesson. The table is
set with moody guitars, a laid-back bass line, and
a simple rimshot drumbeat punctuated by a re-
peating blast of horns — with enough mysterious
sounds underneath to make Lee “Scratch” Perry
turn his head. In alternating verses, the rappers

break bread, cementing the binary mythology
of OutKast. Big Boi (Aquarius): “We missed a
lot of church so the music is our confessional.”
Andre 3000 (Gemini): “Sin all depends on what
you believing in / Faith is what you make it.”
Any notes on “Aquemini” must also take
heed of Andre’s closing verse — the meter, the
message, the mind. Be not afraid of greatness.
Hear him, revolve.

21. “LONESOME ATLANTA BLUES”

Bobby Grant

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Bobby Grant is a mystery of the 78-rpm era.
Facts are scarce. He made one record, a pair of
slide-guitar country-blues numbers: “Nappy
Head Blues” backed with “Lonesome Atlanta
Blues.” According to the matrices kept by Para-
mount Records, Grant recorded the sides in
Ghicago circa December 1927. His name appears
again as the possible guitar accompanist on Ruby
Paul’s B-side “Last Farewell Blues,” recorded
around the same time. Gollectors, historians.

and conspiracists have proffered a variety of
theories about Grant in the quarters of the
Internet where these debates tend to unfold.
Could he be Georgian Barbecue Bob (Robert
Hicks), employing a one-time pseudonym to
duck contractual obligations with Columbia
Records? Or perhaps another name assumed by
Joe Holmes, the Mississippian who recorded the
four Paramount sides credited to King Solomon
Hill? Some hear Alabama in the playing tech-
nique, others the Delta. The mystery is further
convoluted by an inconvenient but unavoidable
piece of evidence : the voices on Grant’s two sides
are markedly different.

Whoever wrote (and sang?) “Lonesome At-
lanta Blues” seems familiar with the city — and
with missing it, as he longs to be back there
“down on Decatur Street,” the infamous heart
of Atlanta’s African-American district. It is
neither the most lonesome country blues song
nor the most emblematic of Atlanta, and the
playing and singing is not exceptional next
to, say. Blind Willie McTell. But “Lonesome
Atlanta Blues” is a mysteriously beautiful time

“Galilee” (2014), by Bo Bartlett

OxfordAmerican.org

capsule worthy of examination nearly a cen-
tury on. Whether his “dirty old feeling” was
the sadness of a lifetime or just an afternoon
blues, “Bobby Grant” captured the feeling of
being far from home, alone.

22 . “RECENT TITLE” Pylon
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Pylon’s ambivalence about being a band is
far from apparent in the tight power of their
records or the energy of their live performances.
Nor would you expect, based on their status as
progenitors of Athens’s storied music scene,
that singer Vanessa Briscoe “never planned on
being a musician.” In fact, it seemed that none of
them did. The members of Pylon were artists in
the first instance, and saw playing music as yet
another means of creating art. They kept at it
as long as it was fun, releasing only two records
before disbanding in 1983.

If “Recent Title” had been included on their
1980 debut, Gyrate, for which it was recorded,
fans might have picked up on the lyrical clues.
It is a defiant stand against obligation, against
doing anything at all. “1 can do what 1 want to,”
Briscoe sings without irony. “1 can say anything 1

want to about anybody, or I can just stand here.”
The song culminates with a livelier message:
let’s dance.

23. “MIDNIGHT RIDER”

Allman Brothers Band
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
We’ve placed one of the most recognizable
rock & roll songs ever made toward the end
of the CD to lend it some needed contextual
freshness, like a fat red rose in a bouquet. If
you can listen to this song anew, what you’ll
hear is the birth of Southern rock — body and
soul. There’s a reason “Midnight Rider” is a
fixed point in the trajectory of rock music.
The Allman Brothers Band had something the
likes of which has not been heard before or
since. As was written in Vicksburg: remember

DUANE ALLMAN.

24. “MIDNIGHT” Fittwrebirds
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
By T 962 , Ray Charles was the king of r&b,
perhaps the most famous black man in the world,
and among the most revered musicians working

Just as two highways here meld into a rich biues cuiture, so
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together to create some of the rnost authentic food you’ll find
anywhere. Check out an Amish bakery, Lebanese and Italian
restaurants, tamale and barbecue diners, farm-to-table cafes,
and soul food in juke joints and clubs. You can drool over
descriptions all day long, but you have to come taste in person.

We’re saving a table for you.

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662.627.6149
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in any genre. That is to say: he could do anything
he pleased. So he went to Nashville and made
two albums of country standards, reimagined in
the Ray Charles way. Modern Sounds in Country
and Western Music and its follow-up. Volume
Two, are massive genre-bending achievements.
They even stand out in a career as staggering
as his.

“Midnight,” from the second album, was
written by a pair of songwriting legends with
ties to Georgia, Boudleaux Bryant and Chet
Atkins, and had already been made famous three
times over by country stars in the 1950s. Ray
transformed it. We’ve taken the song a step fur-
ther by asking the Athens rockers Futurebirds
to try it on. In this recording, made especially
for the Oxford American ’s Georgia Music issue,
Futurebirds proved up to task, washing Charles’s
rendition in a lovely psychedelic haze.

“My granddad gave me his copy of Modern
Sounds Two about six years ago, and ‘Midnight’ is
the song I always come back to, ” singer Thomas
Johnson said. “The track is so moody and groovy.
We hope we did the song justice.”

25. “MOON RIVER” (1961 DEMO)

Henry Mancini & Johnny Mercer

Sometime in the winter or spring of 1961,
Henry Mancini composed the tune for what
would become one of the most recognizable
songs of all time, thanks to Audrey Hepburn
and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The words she sang
from that windowsill were written by the great
lyricist Johnny Mercer, inspired by memories
of his childhood on the Vernon River, an inlet
south of Savannah. Genius loves company.

Since they only composed “Moon River” for
the film, it was believed that Mancini and Mer-
cer never actually recorded the song together,
but in the fall of 2014, Chris Mancini found
an acetate demo recording among a box of his
father’s things in the attic: Mancini and Mercer,
piano and vocals. It’s not hard to imagine the men
cutting this take the moment they’d finished
writing the song, the melody yet unproven,
the ink barely dry on the lyrics. Here it is, my
huckleberry friends: the spectacular first take
of an American musical masterpiece.

Liner notes by Maxwell George, with additional research
by Eliza Borne and Grant Taylor. The Oxford American
would like to thank the creators and rights holders of
these songs for allowing us to reproduce their music.
Detailed credits can be found on p. 175.

Our deep gratitude extends especially to three Geor-
gians — David Barbe, Lance Ledbetter, and Lisa Love —
who were instrumental in the creation of this project.

WINTER 2015

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- ‘ARTS TEWESSEE

Searching
the Desert for
the Blues

BY

PETER GURALNICK

lues really was the transformation of my
life.

When 1 was fifteen or sixteen, a friend
and I just kind of stumbled onto the music. It
was the beginning of the folk revival — 1959 or
1960 — and somehow in the midst of all that
wholesomeness, we fell into the blues.

To this day I don’t know what it was exactly —
I had never heard anything quite like it. But
it just grabbed me. It completely turned me
around. Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Bill Broonzy,
Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Muddy
Waters and Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf.
And Blind Willie McTell.

Now, they were aU wonderful. Truly wonder-
ful, in the sense of “full of wonder” — which was
the state in which my friend and I perpetually
found ourselves as we listened, open-mouthed,
to the music. Maybe it was the directness of the
conversation. Maybe it was the stark, unadorned
and unenhanced reality that each of these art-
ists embraced, reality in all of its multifarious
beauty, ugliness, and undifferentiated truth.

There was something about the way in which
harsh facts could be transmuted into metaphor,
pain into joy, a simple three- or four-chord struc-
ture and AAB verse that almost anybody could
grasp was able to open up into an unfathomable
realm of exploration that I had never encoun-
tered before. Well, let me quote James Baldwin,
whom I read at almost exactly the same time,
on the uplifting song of a community in which
imagination and self-invention trumped pedi-
gree, in which there existed what Baldwin calls
“a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and
surviving disaster . . . very moving and very
rare. Perhaps we were all of us,” he reflected in
The Fire Next Time, “pimps, whores, racketeers,
church members and children — bound together

by the nature of our oppression.” If so, it was
that inescapably shared heritage, Baldwin went
on, that helped create the dynamic that allowed
one “to respect and rejoice in . . . life itself, and
to be presentin all that one does, from the effort
of loving to the breaking of bread.”

In other words, the indomitable spirit, among
other things, of the blues. It was, as Baldwin
wrote in his short story “Sonny’s Blues,” a tale
that is “never new [but] must always be heard . . .
it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness. ”
But for all that commonality of spirit — and
the blues truly is a shared heritage in a sense that
few are willing to recognize in this proprietary
age: “NOBODY,” as Bob Dylan proclaimed,
“can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

L et me give you a httle bit of our take on Blind
Wilhe McTell — his music, not the myth that
we constructed from it. (I’ll get to the myth in a
moment.) The first song I ever heard by Blind
WiUie McTell was his masterpiece, “Statesboro
Blues,” though so many of his songs can rightly
be called masterpieces. What was so striking
about “Statesboro Blues,” then and now, was
its utter unclassifiability. I suppose that’s true
of all great art, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to
Robert Johnson, from Alice Munro to Howlin’
Wolf. But the thing about “Statesboro Blues”
was that, as much as you might be able to locate
some of its disparate elements — the “going up
the country” theme, for example, seems to have
originated with Sippie Wallace (though who
knows where Sippie Wallace got it from) — there
was no Venn diagram, there was no blueprint
that could tell you how to put it all back to-
gether again.

Propelled by McTell’s ringing, delicately ac-
cented twelve-string guitar, “Statesboro Blues”
is an epic tale of dislocation and commonality
(“Brother got ’em, friends got ’em / 1 got ’em /
Woke up this morning, we had them Statesboro
blues / I looked over in the corner / Grandma
and Grandpa had ’em, too”) that’s most familiar
to contemporary listeners in the Allman Broth-
ers’ inexorably anthemic version. Here, though,
it is presented with such charm, such casual
beauty, such utter lack of predictability — lyri-
cal, metrical, thematic — that it surprises every
time. There’s a plarntiveness, too, not normally
associated with the blues, not just in the high,
slightly nasal voice that delivers the lyrics with
an uncommon purity and precision but in the
lilting, melodic approach to a number that still
possesses as much inarguable authenticity as
the most affecting of “deep blues.”

I think that was what intrigued me most about

Blind Wilhe McTeU’s work — the way in which it
could combine both unapologetic winsomeness
and undisguised profundity. It was clever, it
could suggest grace, humor, sexual suggestive-
ness, sometimes even menace — all with equal
authority. But at its heart, it possessed a core
of both delicacy and tensile strength; McTell
brought to it a subtlety of approach rarely as-
sociated with the powerhouse impact of the
twelve-string guitar. Above all, he displayed a
breadth of imagination that allowed him to cover
virtually every aspect not just of the African-
American experience but of the entire American
vernacular tradition.

He sang everything from blues to ragtime
to popular songs of the day and sentimental
numbers of yesteryear, from hillbilly yodels
to way-back spirituals and moans, in addition,
of course, to one of his specialties, a breezy
form of recitatifthix could pass for the rap of its
day. And he could do it all at the drop of a hat.
He could play the part of a pimp, a gambler, a
nightclub roue, or a roving cowboy — with wit,
imagination, a knowing wink of complicity,
or an air of irrefutable authority. Or he could
provide us with a sly original like “Travelin’
Blues,” which takes us on a tour of what he calls
“South America” (in other words, the American
South), with all of its implicit allusions to the
fives that were led, the stories that could be told,
even as the guitar summons up the sounds of
the landscape, and the crying of the shde guitar
suggests a whole unspoken subtext lying just
beneath the surface.

In 1 940, he recorded a tantalizing session for
the Library of Congress that came about only
because folklorist John Lomax’s wife. Ruby,
spotted “a Negro man with a guitar” at the Pig
’n Whistle barbecue stand (Pig ’n Whistle Red
was another one of his latter-day sobriquets) and
Blind Willie agreed to record some numbers,
since business at the drive-in was slow. The re-
sult was a melange of folk songs, rags, spirituals,
pop, and pre-blues material, interspersed with
monologues revealing not just his astonishing
powers of recall but an analytic approach to what
John Lomax labeled “history of the blues [and]
life as a maker of records.”

Just listening to a little bit of this interview —
with the understanding that Blind Wilhe felt,
for good reason, I think, that his interviewer
was trying to put him in a “trick bag” (Lomax
was doing his very best to get songs of social
protest out of his subject, something I would
imagine McTell might have considered bad for
business) — provides a fascinating glimpse not
only of a career in music but of a reflective and

WINTER 2015

highly individuated life, and one can only wish
there could have been more. But we are at least
hearing the real voice of Blind Willie McTell.
Or, one is led sometimes to wonder by the sly
confidence with which he presents his conclu-
sions (“1 am talking about the days of years
ago — how from 19 and 8 on up . . . blues have
started to be original”), are we?

But I said before 1 was going to talk a little bit
about the myth we built up around him. Well, 1
know this is going to sound silly, but the Blind

Willie McTell we constructed when we first
encountered him was kind of like a ghost rider
who, whatever his real-life state of corporeal-
ity, would go on forever, in defiance of all the
immutable laws of human existence. 1 know, 1
know. I said this was going to sound silly. And,
of course, it was based on a number of serious
fundamental misconceptions — but most of all
it was based on the power of the music and the
romantic illusion that I still fall back on from
time to time: that the dauntless, unvanquishable

spirit that created all that music, that propelled
Blind Willie and Blind Samuel and Barrelhouse
Sammy (The Country Boy) and Hot Shot Willie
into all those recording sessions, could somehow
never be stilled. Because one of the most remark-
able facts about the actual life of Blind Willie
McTell — and this was about the only fact that
we knew about him for a long time — was that
he continued to record year after year, decade
after decade, from his first session for Victor
in 1927 (“I continued my playing up until 19

- 19 -

Blind Willie McTell with twelve-string guitar, Atlanta. Photo by Ruby Lomax. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

OxfordAmerican.org

and 27, the 18th day of October, when I made
records for the Victor Record people”) to his last
for an Atlanta record store owner in 1956. And
this was without hits to sustain him, without
the kind of record company enthusiasm that
a first-generation blues star like Blind Lemon
Jefferson or later ones like Leroy Carr or Big
Bill Broonzy would receive, and, perhaps most
important, without the kind of posthumous
boost you’re likely to attract if word gets around
that you have sold your soul to the devil, as it
did for Robert Johnson some thirty years after
his death.

Blind Willie McTell simply kept showing
up — and showing up under all those unlikely
pseudonyms. 1 mean, how could anyone that
determined not to go away ever die? And how
were we to know that in fact he had died shortly
before we even discovered his music? We cer-
tainly could never have guessed that his real
name was McTier, or McTear — or dreamt that
he made a decent living from his craft (for many
years he played regularly for the white patrons
of the Pig ’n Whistle where John Lomax found
him, as well as for black audiences at the famed
81 Theatre in Atlanta).

Because Blind Willie McTell was in fact a
professional entertainer. Even more to the point,
he was something we could never have imag-
ined at the time: a well-educated, well-read,
self-sufficient bluesman, who, as blues scholar
David Evans has pointed out, put his wife, Kate,
through nursing school, had a solid, supportive
network of family and friends to sustain him
in good times and bad, and led a life that in our
youthful naivete it would have been almost
impossible for us to conceive of, a life that in-
corporated both order and art.

Well, it’s sfiWa little difficult to conceive of,
and if it was our naivete then, to some extent it
continues to be a commonplace misconception,
simply because, as blues singer Johnny Shines
once said, so many who profess to love the blues
insist that it is nothing more than a primitive
music, its practitioners outcasts by both choice
and definition, though Johnny Shines for one
didn’t consider himself an outcast in the least.
“1 play the blues,” he said, “but I don’t feel that
the blues is dirty. Society decided for us that
the blues was dirty.” And he was determined
to disprove that notion, he said, by consciously
and illuminatingly carrying the music on.

A t some point in my own education I dis-
covered the limitations of just theoriz-
ing about the music — sitting in your room
and mulling over lyrics you could never fully

decipher or going to see Lightnin’ Hopkins
perform at a college concert (he was the first
blues singer 1 ever saw, and I can tell you —
he was awesome). The way that we had been
introduced to the music, the blues was dead
almost by definition because we had encoun-
tered it only on records — we never heard it
on the radio; it wasn’t presented, like rock &
roll, say, at shows. It seemed somehow as if
it was something that had been tucked safely
away in the past (even if in many cases it was
the very recent past), a subject for historical
study, however passionate that study might be.

The light only dawned for me with the
coming of soul music (Otis Redding, Solomon
Burke, Joe Tex), first on the radio, then with
the first soul revue 1 ever saw, the 1964 Hot
Summer Shower of Stars, with Solomon as the
headliner and both Joe and Otis (and many,
many others) on the bill. It has long been my
firmest belief that in order to write — fiction,
nonfiction, it doesn’t matter — you need to make
the empathetic leap. But, really, in order to live
you have to make that same leap, whether or
not in certain harsh literary and political circles
“empathy” has become a dirty word. Well, I can
tell you, I made that jump as if 1 were getting
ready for the Empathy Olympics, without either
hesitation or fear. From that soul revue on, I
attended every show that came to town. After
being offered the opportunity, 1 even started to
usher the shows, a formidable challenge for an
excruciatingly self-conscious twenty-year-old.
But the music allowed me to overcome my inhi-
bitions, or at least ignore them for as long as the
moment lasted. And the music in almost every
case sprang directly from the living tradition
of the blues — and of course, the church, from
which the blues ultimately sprang. “There is
no music like that music,” Baldwin also wrote,
“no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing
. . . [nothing] to equal the fire and excitement
that sometimes, without warning, fill a church,
causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many
others have testified, to ‘rock.’”

Which leads more or less directly to Blind
Willie McTell ’s fellow Georgian James Brown,
hailing, as he frequently declared, from “Au-
gusta, GA.” (As McTell told John Lomax, “1
was born at Thomson, Georgia, 134 miles from
Atlanta and 37 miles west of Augusta.”) 1 don’t
think I have to tell any present-day aficionado
with the slightest acquaintance with YouTube
how cataclysmic it was to see the James Brown
Show in 1965. But back then, in a prehistoric
worldin which James Brown and Howlin’ Wolf
and Big Joe Turner were barred not just from

mainstream acceptance but from mainstream
notice, I really did feel compelled to tell the
world. That’s why I first started writing about
music: to proclaim to the world how great that
music was. 1 think the first story 1 ever wrote
for print was about James Brown, and it was
intended solely to draw people to something
that for me was the most electrifying theatrical
event 1 had ever witnessed — and remains so. In
an age of Happenings — legitimate theater was
increasingly intended at that time to be eruptive
and spontaneous — there was nothing that could
hold a candle to the theatrics that exploded
every time James Brown set foot onstage. The
ferocity of his energy, the uncompromising
commitment he gave to every show, the hyp-
notic quality of his incantatory performance,
the ongoing drama of death and resurrection
that he enacted night after night, every night,
onstage — well, everyone has their own memo-
ries to fall back on, whether of James Brown, or
of some other equally electrifying performer.
(1 mean, come on, 1 can’t imagine anyone that
electrifying!) But the point is, none of that
pushed out — I’m sure James Brown would have
been the first to insist: it all built on — Blind
Willie McTell. And Louis Jordan. And Sister
Rosetta Tharpe. On a tradition that whether or
not it is likely to be explicitly acknowledged,
or even recognized, by contemporary artists
or audiences, remains the underpinning for so
much of the music that continues to provide
us with inspiration today.

Sometimes I think about what might have
happened if Blind Willie McTell had lived for
just a few more years. He died just short of the
1960s blues revival in which long-forgotten,
or never-known, artists like Son House, Skip
James, Sleepy John Estes, and Mississippi John
Hurt were rediscovered and celebrated — and
contemporary performers like Muddy Waters
and Howlin’ Wolf found entirely new careers.
Think of what Blind WiUie McTell might have
made of that kind of opportunity. With his wit,
charm, insouciance, and native capacity for adap-
tation, one could imagine him as a rediscovered
superstar, the James Brown of the country blues
movement. But in a sense that’s a misreading
not just of the blues but of the entire span and
tradition of American vernacular music, from
Charley Patton to Bill Monroe, from Hank Wil-
liams to Chuck Berry, from Mahalia Jackson to
Elvis Presley.

The blues, as Blind Willie McTell attempted
in his own way to explain in that vexed inter-
view with John Lomax, is above all a tradition
in which generation after generation has par-

- 20 -

WINTER 2015

ticipated. It is a homemade music not all that
different from the music of James Brown that
calls up all sorts of common memories and was
bred on the call-and-response pattern (originat-
ing in both the church and the cotton field)
in which the audience’s response is nearly as
important as the singer’s call. Above all, it has
always been a music centered around the human
voice, made on whatever instruments are avail-
able, taking whatever situations and conditions
are at hand and transforming them by sheer force
of imaginative will, seeking not to deny those
conditions but to transcend them by celebrating
the diversity, the creativity, the spontaneity and
indomitability of a culture that simply refused
to allow itself to be defined by its oppressors.
As James Brown proclaimed, “I’m black and
I’m proud.” Which, racial specificity aside, was
in a very real sense the whole thrust of rock &
roll, too, the music that for the first time fused
the traditions of everyone, black and white,
who had ever been denied a place at the table.
Think of Carl Perkins, in the midst of the genial
nursery-rhyme versification of “Blue Suede
Shoes,” coming back again and again with the
same message of good-humored pride and defi-
ance: Whatever you do, don’t you step on my
blue suede shoes. Or as Merle Haggard would
declare, in a somewhat different context but
with no less personal or poetic conviction, “I
Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am.”

More and more, we are a culture of lists.
There’s always got to be a No. 1 . There always
has to be a “Best. ” I remember a few years ago —
well, it’s fifteen years ago now — at the time of
the much- vaunted millennium, I got all kinds of
calls from mainstream magazines and periodicals
(yes, they still existed then) who wanted to
know about Elvis mostly, because of my re-
cent biography. Was he the entertainer of the
century? Or maybe even of the millennium?

Well, I don’t know. I suppose I could have
said. No, it was James Brown. Or Blind Willie
McTell. Or Merle Haggard. Or Solomon Burke.
But that would have been falling into the same
trap. The point that I made to each and every
one of them — and perhaps it should come as no
great surprise that it was not quoted by a single
one — was that Elvis alone wasn’t the point.
That if Elvis, a blues-influenced musician if
ever there was one, had achieved anything, if
there was one thing of which he was unques-
tionably proud, it was that he contributed to
a cultural revolution as significant as anything
that we have witnessed in our time, a cultural
revolution in which blues (and bluegrass, and
gospel, and country music, and jazz, and soul)

was very much in the forefront. Because looking
back on it, the twentieth century clearly saw
the triumph of American vernacular music — a
near-global recognition that here was America’s
greatest cultural contribution to the world,
with the blues serving as both an underpin-
ning and a common language that at its best
continues to represent the polyglot nature of
true democracy.

And Blind Willie McTell? Despite everything
I’ve said, and all the facts that I’ve learned. I’ve
got to admit I still expect him to turn up — in one

of his many guises, under one of his innumer-
able pseudonyms. And, you know, the funny
thing is, in his own way he does. Every time
we hear his voice, every time we encounter the
persistence of his music, the truth of his vision,
the triumph of his hard -won art, it announces
over and over again, in its own way, the casual
beauty of the illimitable. That’s what Blind Wil-
lie McTell, or Blind Samuel, or Pig ’n Whistle
Red, or Georgia Bill still has to offer. Who’s to
say that one or another of them won’t show up
on our doorstep tomorrow?

to.

-DISCOVER-

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THE HISTORY OF IMPROVISATION

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lively examination of the centuries-old
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Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems

FROM THE AUTHOR of

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A New Orleans Family Memoir

THE NEW BOOK BY RANDY FERTEL

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That Old
Black Magic

BY

JOHN LINGAN

S upposedly, in a moment of frustration in the
early 1950s, Sam Phillips told his husmess
partner, “If I could find a white man who
had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could
make a billion dollars.” Only a few years later,
Phillips would record Elvis Presley and more or
less prove the point. But for all the savvy of his
label boss, the King wasn’t the first white boy
to bring a firsthand love of black culture to the
American musical mainstream. A generation
earlier, another Southerner — this one entirely
un-Presley-like in his sound and upbringing —
drew from the same tradition and made, if not
quite a billion dollars, certainly an inexhaustible
fortune, and left behind a half-dozen of America’s
most indelible melodies besides.

Johnny Mercer arrived in New J(brk in 1928,
at the height of Tin Pan Alley. George Gershwin
had premiered “Rhapsody in Blue” four years
prior, and Cole Porter was at work on what would
become his first hit musical, Paris. The Roaring
Twenties were American music’s debutante ball,
the historical moment when urbane sophisticates
wed jazz idioms and orchestral ambition. Before,
the young nation boasted only regional music:
minstrelsy. Dixieland, cowboy tunes, shape note.
Now it had the Great American Songbook.

Mercer was eighteen at the time and had
listened to songs by Gershwin, Porter, Irving
Berlin, and their N ew York colleagues for years
during his rollicking yet privileged adolescence
in Savannah. But coming from a moneyed Geor-
gia family, with ancestors who fought in both
the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, his musical
background included more than just their pop
hits. In an unpublished memoir — written in
1973, three years before his death — Mercer
begins his life story with a description of the
commute to his family’s summer home in the
country: “The roads were still unpaved, made
of crushed oyster shell, and as they wound

their way under the trees covered with Span-
ish moss, it was a sweet, indolent background
for a boy to grow up in. ” Even more than the
rural Georgia scenery, he recalls “the help,”
who lived in nearby houses on the property and
came over regularly to do their own domestic
upkeep — laundry, cooking, bathing — in addi-
tion to serving the Mercers:

Having all those colored people around
meant having a lot of music also, and not
only did we get the traditional lullabies
and work songs, but we’d get to hear their
church services upon an occasional Sunday.
Asa matter of fact, I can hardly ever remem-
ber there not being music, in town or out.
My Aunt Hattie swears I hummed back at
her at the tender age of 6 months, and she
always used to take me to see the minstrel

shows which were so popular then in the

South as well as the big Northern cities.

At the country property, on the banks of the
Vernon River — a landscape that inspired “Moon
River,” for which Mercer would later win the
third of his four “best original song” Oscars, in
1961 — he heard these same black families speak
Geechee, the Carolina dialect that Gershwin ap-
propriated for Porgy and Bess. But Mercer’s cross-
cultural education was fostered in the city as well.
His father, a banker who lost his fortune right as
Johnny set out for Manhattan, sang along to his
sizable collection of race records at home. As soon
as Johnny was old enough, he did his own record
shopping, showing a particular appetite for Louis
Armstrong. With his parents and brother, he was
a regular attendee of the famed Savannah Easter
parade, a vibrant showcase of black dance, music.

“Castaway/Harvest” (2013), by Jeffrey Whittle

OxfordAmerican.org

■ 23 -

and fashion. His black nurse sang him spirituals in
between lullabies. (Decades later, Mercer would
pay to repair the roof of her church.) As a boy,
he took regular walks through town, peeking
in the city’s black churches, grabbing a seat if a
pew was open. His regular stops included the
United House of Prayer for All People, where he
heard the controversial Charles Manuel “Sweet
Daddy” Grace preach during the faith healer’s
regular trips to town.

“George Gershwin could go up to Harlem to
hear jazz and blues,” wrote biographer Philip Fu-
ria, but “Johnny Mercer, alone among the great
songwriters of his generation, was, from the day
he was born, influenced by the music of blacks.”

R elative to Elvis, Mercer’s most famous songs
bore little of that influence on the surface.
He wrote the lyrics for an unbelievable run of
hits in the late 1930s and ’40s, often recording
his own popular versions as a vocalist: “Come
Rain or Come Shine,” “You Must Have Been
a Beautiful Baby,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Too
Marvelous for Words , ” “ One for My Baby (And
One More for the Road),” “Laura,” “Fools Rush
In.” But his very first commercial success, a less-
er-known 1933 Hoagy Carmichael collaboration
called “Lazybones, ” which was a hit for Mildred
Bailey (and later Louis Armstrong himself), was
a direct homage to the voices he’d heard as a boy:

Long as there is chicken gravy on your rice,
Everything is nice.

Long as there’s a watermelon on your vine,
Everything is fine . . .

Lazybones, sleepin ’ in the shade.

How you ’spec’ to get your cornmeal made?
Never get your cornmeal made,

Sleepin ’ in the evenin ’ shade.

“Lazybones,” recorded the same year that
Gershwin’s Geechee opera premiered, depicts
“taters” in the ground, the hot noon sun, and a
fishing line hanging in the water — a Southern
pastoral so Edenic that it’s nearly pastiche. It’s
also, despite black artists’ embrace of the song,
a borderline-racist depiction of Southern black-
ness, a cousin of Disney’s Song of the South, from
the next decade. But “Lazybones” is of a piece
with Mercer’s better-known, more universal com-
positions, which, while always clever, were never
more complicated than they needed to be. His
melodies don’t leap and dash — they glide along
conversationally, as if he made them up on the
spot. Lyrically, he never used two syllables when
one would do, and he returned to Southern nature

scenes over and over again, letting his images
quietly speak for themselves. In “Skylark,” one
of his most-recorded songs, he asks the title bird.

Have you seen a valley green with spring.

Where my heart can go a-journeying?

Over the shadows and the rain.

To a blossom-covered lane.

And in my favorite of his songs, the 1939
Jimmy Van Heusen tune “I Thought About
Yju,” he finds uncommon emotional complexity
in an uneventful nighttime ride:

I took a trip on a train

And I thought about you.

I passed a shadowy lane

And I thought about you.

Two or three cars parked under the stars.

Winding stream.

Moon shining down on some little town.

And with each beam, the same old dream.

Is the singer sad or happy, regretful or homy?
He claims to feel blue, but that’s as much as we’re
told about his internal state. Instead, we’re pre-
sented with one fleeting, unpeopled scene after
another, all described with an absolute minimum
of words and ordy the shghtest up-and-down
incremental melody. When Yip Harburg, the
celebrated lyricist and Mercer mentor, described
his protege as “one of our great folk poets,” this
was the kind of song he surely had in mind.

B eyond his lyrics’ rural and black affecta-
tions — the dropped g’s, the compone scen-
ery — Mercer brought a distinctly Southern
stillness to American pop. Economical yet vivid
in his natural descriptions, he kept his songs’
emotions at a cool simmer and rarely told stories,
instead opting for calm, wistful dioramas like
the one he arranges in “Early Autumn” :

When an early autumn walks the land and
chills the breeze

And touches with her hand the summer trees.
Perhaps you ’ll understand what memories
I own.

There’s a dance pavilion in the rain all shut-
tered down,

A winding country lane all russet brown,

A frosty windowpane shows me a town grown
lonely.

Mercer wrote nearly 1,500 songs, so maybe
it’s unfair to point out that three of the four

I’ve quoted so far include mention of a “lane,”
an easy (and easily rhymeable) symbol for es-
capist romance. But I wouldn’t be the first to
acknowledge his complacent streak; prolific as
he was, Mercer garnered a reputation as a bit of
a lazybones himself.

He preferred to write lyrics while supine, eyes
closed, “as if he could dream songs into exis-
tence,” according to the critic Wilfrid Sheed. His
entire public persona was built around this same
aloofness; onstage (a rare occurrence, though he
became better known for live performances in
the 1970s), his mind seemed to be elsewhere,
and even his Tinseltown reminiscences seem
muted, obligatory. While Mercer worked con-
sistently for decades, for every great pop com-
poser of the era, he was strongest on the scale of
individual songs. No major Broadway success,
no film soundtrack, no grand artistic statement
ever sprung from those naps with the muse. His
tower of song was built verse by casual verse.

His singing voice, too — like that of another
Southern-bred, Hollywood-friendly master
of concision, Randy Newman, who resembles
Mercer more than any songwriter since at least
the Brill Building era — could blur the line be-
tween “relaxed” and “soporific.” He made his
friend and early creative partner Bing Crosby
sound over-caffeinated.

But he roiled inside. When he drank, which
he did often, he got blackout hammered and
became infamously abusive. He spewed insults
at good friends, dumped cocktails on his wife’s
head, urinated in a hostess’s shoes, and once tried
to force himself on his own niece. In the morn-
ings he was always contrite, sending remorseful
notes of apology, and most recollections of Mer-
cer are besotted, not angry. In Savannah now, he
is remembered as a classic Southern gentleman,
an inspiration for museums, historical walks,
and John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil. You’d think he owned the place.
But in fact, he tended to keep the town at arm’s
length, as he did most things.

Asked by the state legislature to compose a
new official Georgia song, he came up with a rare
seven-verse epic that slathers on the good-ole-
summertime hokum and never reveals anything
meaningful about his attachment to the place:

Georgia, Georgia, where do I start?

Words can sing but not like the heart;

There’s no land in all this earth,

Like the land of my birth.

Georgia, Georgia, careless yield

Watermelons ripe in the f eld;

- 24 -

WINTER 2015

Fine trees full of red-bird song,

River rollin ’ along.

Georgia nights when twilight is done,

Smell of peaches long in the sun.

Breeze comes hlowin ’ through the shade
Like a cool lemonade.

The song, according to his memoir, was ultimately
rejected for being “too Savannah” to reflect the whole
state, but that might grant it too much credit. Rare
for Mercer, he lifted a few lines from another source,
in this case Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown s
Body, ” though he borrowed none of Benet s galloping
intensity. Instead, this ode to Georgia is positively
generic, proof that Mercer’s genius was for sly gesture
and restrained emotion, not heart-swelling pride and
love, and certainly not for unabashed sentimentahsm.

Perhaps this is Johnny Mercer’s true legacy — he
not only smuggled a genuine Southern musical sensi-
bility into the Great American Songbook, he brought
along the whole breadth of regional contradictions
that have historically fed so much of the South’s art
and angst. He was both a manor-bom gentleman
and a venomous alcohohc; a prolific natural talent
and, according to many who knew him, a bafflingly
unambitious artist; he had black music and speech
in his marrow, yet never had a close black friend.
He may have been the first writer to bring Southern
identity to American pop, yet one of his most famous
songs claimed, “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.”
Like any pioneer, Mercer bridged worlds as a
matter of course. He made the exotic seem natural
and welcome, and never more so than in “That Old
Black Magic,” written in 1941 and inspired by Cole
Porter’s line, “Do do that voodoo that you do so
well,” from “Tbu Do Something to Me.” Mercer
transformed the idea from mere wordplay to a
whole motif, envisioning black magic as a welcome
sensual trance;

That old black magic has me in its spell.

That old black magic that you weave so well.

Icy fingers up and down my spine,

The same old witchcraft when your eyes meet
mine.

The same old tingle that I feel inside
When that elevator starts its ride.

Down and down I go, ’round and ’round I go.
Like a leaf that’s caught in the tide.

Mercer’s words conjured new voices, new vistas,
but they always seem to beckon: don’t fear. No big
words here, no artsy posturing. Even witchcraft is
as natural as the water and the leaves. I may drink
too much, but I’ll always apologize. Come on in. ^

Upbringing

BY

WILLIAM WRIGHT

So shout hallelujah! 3.S they douse the boy in river water.

So bring him up to find his eyes laced in silt —
so the congregants scowl at him, the odd one —

so red the mud smeared in his hair it looks as blood gone slag with sin,
he runs home in rain, his teeth chattering,

so the wind bites at him cold, even in May, the backroad mess

so bog-slocked and rock-slashed — and home now

so the family scatters each self to a nest,

so delicately built with least resentments — and the boy,

so tired, his ears crammed with biblical slosh, sleeps

so soundly, dreams of a girl he will never witness, her hair

struck red against the wetness of her lavender dress,
so lovely, lovely, that when he wakes he’ll walk the farm
so pocked with nails and crates and lichen-licked marl and think never
so much as now of the clay that makes him, the water that shapes him
so heavily, this land a trap, a friend.

o

American.org

■ 25 -

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Nomad,
Indian, Saint

BY

JAMIE QUATRO

1 • She is nineteen, a sophomore at a uni-
versity north of Los Angeles , taking a seminar
on the British Romantic poets. The campus is
perched on a cliff above the Pacific; she never
tires of watching the gradations of blue and
green and slate and — in the evenings — the
colorless scintillations of sunset. Some week-
ends she drives south on Pacific Coast High-
way till it curls into the Santa Monica tunnel;
other weekends, north to Westward and Zuma
beaches, sometimes all the way to County Line.
Catalina Island visible on clear days, beyond
that the ocean stretching to — where? Japan?
She pictures her little car on the map, hugging
the edge of the continent, water and cliff and
sky all angles, vast and intimidating. She is
insignificant in the universe, God a sublime,
untouchable peak. On the stereo is a song by
her new favorite band, the Indigo Girls: Georgia
nights softer than a whisper, peach trees stitched
across the land, farmland like a tapestry. She has
never been to the South but the song paints it
for her, softness and green curves. An intimate

landscape. She feels nostalgic for a place she’s
never seen, smoke from the chimneys meets its
maker in the sky, God at rest in the tips of trees.
Perhaps one might live there someday, make a
home and raise children in Georgia’s hushed
shade. Perhaps, too, this is what Shelley means
by the difference between the beautiful and
the sublime. She lives in the sublime, longs
for the beautiful.

7

^ • She is twenty-four, a doctoral student
at Princeton, working on Wordsworth. Her
favorite poet. She writes a long essay on The
Ruined Cottage but it’s the Immortality Ode
she keeps coming back to. Where does it go,
all that magic from childhood? The fallings
from us, the vanishings? Woolf’s moments of
being, Joyce’s epiphanies, Wordsworth’s spots
of time, yes, she thinks, yes — how they break
in on us, unbidden; how they carry us back
to the past, remind us of the connection we
had to divinity, once. How apt the turn in the
Ode: thanks be for those shadowy recollec-
tions, fountain light of all our day, with the
power to make our noisy years seem moments
in the being of the eternal Silence. Thanks to
the years that bring the philosophic mind and
on her headphones, during long runs, it’s still
the Indigo Girls: This world falls on me, hopes
of immortality, everywhere I turn, all the beauty
just keeps shaking me. This world was meant for
me. The Indigo Girls, she thinks, would totally

Wordsworth.

• She is twenty-eight, with three children,
ages three and two and six months. She is
tired, indolent, has trouble getting out of bed.
A neighbor’s baby is bom with massive spinal

defects and she cannot feel bad for the neighbor,
or for the baby. (Why can’t she feel anything)
Acedia: one of the seven deadly sins, the mood
in which the good wishes to play upon us but
we have no string to respond. She is reading
Merton’s Contemplative Prayer. He writes of
the balance between contemplation and action,
Mary and Martha, and she is aU Mary and no
Martha, trapped in her own head, self-absorbed.
Narcissus. Rodin’s “Thinker.” Now I know a
refuge never grows from a chin in a hand in a
thoughtful pose, gotta tend the earth if you want
a rose. Get up, she tells herself, listening to the
song. Get your ass out of bed.

• She is thirty-three and grieving. She has
hurt those closest to her but doesn’t feel sorry
for that, yet. She only misses the thing that
caused the pain, the source of addiction. There
are counselors, pastors, well-meaning friends,
hut she can only sit at her desk with her fore-
head pressed hard into the wood. She doesn’t
cry, though wishes she could. She mostly just
takes deep breaths. She is waiting for clarity, the
black-and-white certainty she once had about
what is right, and what is wrong, to settle back
over her. For the ship of safety to come back and
pick her up. It doesn’t return. She has sunk it.
She goes, finally, to the doctors, takes walks on
the mountain. Looks to her children, does the
workouts, reads the Bible. But what if she is
meant to learn (years later she will know this is
the case) to embrace gray? What if God lives in
the questions and not the answers ; in the great
ugly struggle itself, not in the finish, the win
or loss? Perhaps she will hve the same story,
over and over, for the rest of her life. Perhaps
it is the very struggle that will take her closer,
and closer, to fine.

“Littoral Drift Continuum #02” (Four Moments in Forty-eight Hours, Rodeo Beach, CA 07.21.13, One Wave, Plunged), by Mcghann Riepenhoff

OxfordAmerican.org

- 27 -

(A PREQUEL)

BY KIESE LAYMON

Illustration of OutKast by Adam Shaw

■ 29 -

rom six in the morning until five in the af-
ternoon, five days a week, for thirty years,
my Grandmama Catherine’s fingers, palms,
and wrists wandered deep in the bellies
of dead chickens. Grandmama was a but-
tonhole sheer at a chicken plant in central
Mississippi — her job was to slice the belly and pull out the
guts of thousands of chickens a day. Grandmama got up every
morning around 4:30 A.M. She took her bath, then prepared
grits, smoked sausage, and pear preserves for us. After break-
fast, Grandmama made me take a teaspoon of cod liver oil “for
my vitamins,” then she coated the area between her breasts in
powder before putting on the clothes she had ironed the night
before. 1 was ten, staying with Grandmama for the summer, and
I remember marveling at her preparations and wondering why
she got so fresh, so clean, just to leave the house and get dirty.

“There’s layers to this,” Grandmama often said, when de-
scribing her job to folks. She went into that plant every day,
knowing it was a laboratory for racial and gendered terror. Still,
she wanted to be the best at what she did — and not just the
best buttonhole sheer in the plant, but the best, most stylized,
most efficient worker in Mississippi. She understood that the
audience for her work was not just her co workers or her white
male shift managers, but all the Southern black women work-
ers who preceded her and, most importantly, all the Southern
black women workers coming next.

By the end of the day, when the two-tone blue Impala crept
back into the driveway on the side of our shotgun house. I’d
run out to welcome Grandmama home. “Hey baby,” she’d say.
“Let me wash this stank off my hands before I hug your neck. ”
This stank wasn’t that stink. This stank was root and residue
of black Southern poverty, and devalued black Southern labor,
black Southern excellence, black Southern imagination, and
black Southern woman magic. This was the stank from whence
black Southern life, love, and labor came.

Even at ten years old, I understood that the presence and

necessity of this stank dictated how Grandmama moved on
Sundays. As the head of the usher board at Concord Baptist,
she sometimes wore the all-white polyester uniform that all
the other church ushers wore. On those Sundays, Grandmama
was committed to out-freshing the other ushers by draping
colorful pearls and fake gold around her neck, or stunting with
some shiny shoes she’d gotten from my Aunt Linda in Vegas.
And Grandmama ’s outfits, when she wasn’t wearing the stale
usher board uniform, always had to be fresher this week than
the week before.

She was committed to out-freshing herself, which meant
that she was up late on Saturday nights, working like a wizard,
taking pieces of this blouse from 1984 and sewing them into
these dresses from 1969. Grandmama’s primary audience on
Sundays, her church sisters, looked with awe and envy at her
outfits, inferring she had a fashion industry hook-up from At-
lanta, or a few secret revenue streams. Not so. This was just how
Grandmama brought the stank of her work life into her spiritual
communal life, in a way that I loved and laughed at as a kid.

I didn’t fully understand or feel inspired by Grandmama’s
stank or freshness until years later, when I heard the albums
ATLie«5and Aquemini from those Georgia-based artists called
OutKast.

* * *

O ne day near the beginning of my junior year in college,
1996, 1 walked out of my dorm room in Oberlin, Ohio,
heading to the gym, when I heard a new sound and a
familiar voice blasting from the room of my friend John Norris,
a Southern black boy from Clarksville, Tennessee.

We don’t contribute to your clandestine activity.

My soliloquy may he hard for some to swallow
But so is cod liver oil.

You went behind my hack like Bluto when be cut up Olive Oyl.
Two things 1 hate: liars and thieves, they make my blood boil.
Boa constricted, on my soul that they coil.

I went into John’s room, wondering who was rapping about
cod liver oil over reverbed bass, and asked him, “What the
fuck is that?” It was “ Wheelz of Steel, ” from ATLiens. Norris
handed me the CD. The illustrated cover looked like a comic
book, its heroes standing back-to-back in front of a mysteri-
ous four-armed force: Big Boi in a letterman’s jacket with a
Braves hat cocked to the right, and Andre in a green turban
like something I’d only seen my Grandmama and Mama Lara
rock. Big Boi’s fingers were clenched, ready to fight. Andre’s
were spread, ready to conjure.

John and I listened to the record twice before I borrowed
my friend’s green Geo, drove to Elyria, and bought ATLiens
for myself. Like Soul Food by Atlanta’s Goodie Mob, another

- 30 -

WINTER 2015

* * '*’

album I was wearing out at the time — their song “Thought
Process,” which featured Andre, had nudged me through the
sadness of missing Mississippi a year earlier — ATLiens was
unafraid of the revelatory dimensions of black Southern life.
Like Soul Food, ATLiens explored the inevitability of death
and the possibility of new life, new movement, and new mojo.

But something was different.

I already knew OutKast; I loved their first album, Soutb-
ernplayalisticadillacmuzik, in part because of the clever way
they interpolated funk and soul into rap. ATLiens, however,
sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard or imagined. The vocal
tones were familiar, but the rhyme patterns, the composition,
the production were equal parts red clay, thick buttery grits,
and Mars. Nothing sounded like ATLiens. The album instantly
changed not just my expectations of music, but my expectations
of myself as a young black Southern artist.

By then, I already knew I was going to be a writer. I had no
idea if I would eat off of what I wrote, but I knew I had to write
to be a decent human being. I used ink and the page to probe
and to remember through essays and sometimes through satire.
I was imitating, and maybe interrogating, but Tm not sure
that I had any idea of how to use words to imagine and really
innovate. All my English teachers talked about the importance
of finding “your voice. ” It always confused me because I knew
we all had so many voices, so many audiences, and my teach-
ers seemed only to really want the kind of voice that sat with
its legs crossed, reading the New York Times. I didn’t have to
work to find that cross-legged voice — it was the one education
necessitated I lead with.

What my English teachers didn’t say was that literary voices
aren’t discovered fully formed. They aren’t natural or organic.
Literary voices are built and shaped — and not just by words,
punctuation, and sentences, but by the author’s intended audi-
ence and a composition’s form. It was only after listening to
ATLiens, discovering Toni Cade Bambara’s Southern Collec-
tive of African-American Writers, and reading the work of
my Mama’s former student, the hip-hop journalist Charlie
Braxton, that I realized in order to get where I needed to go as
a human being and an artist, in order to release my own spacey
stank blues, I had to write fiction. Toni Cade, Charlie, Dre, and
Big showed me it was possible to create and hear imaginary
worlds wholly fertilized with “maybe,” “if,” and “probably.”

I remember sitting in my dorm room under my huge Black
Lightning poster, next to my tiny picture of Grandmama. I was
supposed to be doing a paper on “The Cask of Amontillado,”
but I was thinking about OutKast ’s “Wailin’.” The song made
me know that there was something to be gained, felt, and used
in imitating sounds from whence we came, particularly in the
minimal hook: the repeated moan of one about to wail. I’d
heard that moan in the presence of older Southern black folk
my entire life, but I’d never heard it connecting two rhymed
verses. Art couldn’t get any fresher than that.

B y the mid-nineties, hip-hop was an established art form,
foregrounding a wide, historically neglected audience
in completely new ways. Never had songs had so many
words. Never had songs lacked melodies. Never had songs
pushed against the notion of a hook repeated every forty-five
seconds. Like a lot of Southern black boys, I loved New York
hip-hop, although I didn’t feel loved or imagined by most of it.

When Andre said, “The South got something to say and
that’s all I got to say,” at the Source Awards in 1995, 1 heard
him saying that we were no longer going to artistically follow
New York. Not because the artists of New York were wack, but
because disregarding our particular stank in favor of a stink
that didn’t love or respect us was like taking a broken elevator
down into artistic and spiritual death.

With OutKast, Dre and Big each carved out their own in-
dividual space, and along with sonic contrast — Big lyrically
fought and Andre lyrically conjured — they gave us philosophi-
cal contrast. When Dre raps, “No drugs or alcohol so I can get
the signal clear as day,” I remember folks suggesting there was
a smidgen of shade being thrown on Big Boi, who on the same
album rhymed, “I got an ounce of dank and a couple of dranks,
so let’s crank up this session.” If there was ever shade between
them back then, I got the sense, they’d handle it like we Southern
black boys did: they’d wrassle it out, talk more shit, hug, and
come back ready to out-fresh each other, along with every artist
who’d come before them in the making of lyrical art.

OutKast created a different kind of stank, too: an urban South-
ern stank so familiar with and indebted to the gospel, blues,
jazz, rock, and funk bom in the mral black South. And while
they were lyrically competing against each other on track after
track, together Big and Dre were united, raihng and wailing
against New Yrrk and standing up to a post-civil rights South
chiding young Southern black boys to pull up our pants and
fight white supremacy with swords of respectabihty and narrow
conceptions of excellence. ATLiens made me love being black.
Southern, celibate, sexy, awkward, free of dmgs and alcohol,
Grandmama ’s grandbaby, and cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.

Right out of Oberlin, I earned a fellowship in the MFA pro-
gram at Indiana University, to study fiction. For the first time
in my life, I was thinking critically about narrative construction
in everything from malt liquor commercials to the Bible. It was
around that time that Lauryn Hill gave my generation an elixir
to calm, compete with, and call out a culture insistent on coming
up with new ways to devalue black women. In The Miseduca-
tion of Lauryn Hill, I saw myself as the intimate partner doing
wrong by Lauryn, and she made me consider how for all the
differences between Andre and Big Boi, they shared in the same
kind of misogynoir on their first two albums. (Particularly on
the song “Jazzy Belle”: “Even Bo knew, that you got poked /
like acupuncture patients while our nation is a boat / Straight

OxfordAmerican.org

sinkin’, I hate thinkin’ that these the future mommas of our
children. ”) Miseducation had me expecting a lot more from my
male heroes. A month later, OutKast dropped Aquemini.

Deep into the album, the song “West Savannah” ends with a
skit. We hear a young black boy trying to impress his friend by
calling a young black girl on the phone, three-way. When the girl
answers, we hear a mama, an auntie, or a grandmama tell her to
“get your ass in here.” The girl tells the boy she has to go — and
then the boy tells her that his friend wants some sex. The girl
emphatically lets the boy know there is no way she’s having sex
with him, before hanging up in his face. This is where the next
song, “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Pt. 1),” begins.

In the first verse. Big rhymes about a sexual experience with a
girl named Suzy Screw, during which he exchanges a CD and a
poster for oral sex. In the second, Andre raps about Suzy ’s friend
Sasha Thumper. As Andre’s verse proceeds, he and Sasha are lying
on their backs “staring at stars above, talking about what we gone
be when we grow up.” When Dre asks Sasha what she wants to
be, Sasha Thumper responds, “Alive.” The song ends with the
news that Sasha Thumper has overdosed after partnering with a
man who treats her wrong. Here was “another black experience, ”
as Dre would say to end another verse on the album.

Hip-hop has always embraced metafiction. In the next track —
“Da Art of Storytellin’ (Pt. 2)” — Big and Dre deliver a pair of
verses about the last recording they’ll ever create due to an en-
vironmental apocalypse. We’ve long had emcees rhyming about
the potency of their own rhymes. But I have never heard a song
attribute the end of the world to a rhyme. In the middle of Dre ’s
verse, he nudges us to understand that there’s something more
happening in this song: “Hope I’m not over your head but if so
you will catch on later.”

Big Boi alludes to the Book of Revelation, mentions some
bailers trying to unsuccessfully repent and make it to heaven,
and then rhymes about getting his family and heading to the
Dungeon, their basement studio in Atlanta — the listener can
easily imagine it as a bunker — where he’ll record one last song.
The world is ending. He grabs the mic: “I got in the booth to
run the final portion / The beat was very dirty and the vocals
haddistor-ftow!” Of course, this ending describes the very track
we’re hearing, thus bringing the fictional apocalypse of the song
into our real world.

I was reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred at the time Aquemini
came out. Steeped in all that stank, I conceived of a book within
a book within a book, written by a young Southern black girl
whose parents disappear. “I’m a round runaway character,” was
the first sentence my narrator wrote. I decided that she would
be an emcee, but I didn’t know her name. I knew that she would
tell the world that she was an ellipsis, a runaway ellipsis willing
to do any and all things to stop her black Southern community
from being written off the face of the earth. I scribbled these
notes on the blank pages of KindredvihiAt AqueminiV&^t play-

ing in the background. By the time the song “Liberation” was
done. Long Division, my first novel, was born.

* * *

1 thought about interviewing Andre and Big Boi for this piece.
I was going to get them to spend the night at this huge house
I’m staying in this year as the Writer in Residence at the Uni-
versity of Mississippi. I planned on inviting Grandmama, too.
Between the four of us, I thought we could get to the bottom of
some necessary stank, and maybe play a game of “Who’s Fresher:
Georgia vs. Mississippi.” But the interviews fell through, and
Grandmama refused to come up to Oxford because I’m the only
black person she knows here, and she tends to avoid places where
she doesn’t know many black folks.

I kept imagining the meeting, though, and I thought a lot about
what in the world I would say to Big Boi and Andre. As dope
as they are, there’s nothing I want to ask them about their art. I
experienced it, and I’m thankful they extended the traditions and
frequencies from whence we came. Honestly, the only thing I’d
want to ask them would be about their Grandmamas. Td want
to know if their Grandmamas thought they were beautiful. Td
want to know how their Grandmamas wanted to be loved. I’d
want to know how good they were at loving their Grandmamas
on days when the world wasn’t so kind.

The day that my Grandmama came home after work with-
out the stank of chicken guts, powder, perfume, sweat, and
Coke-Cola, I knew that her time at the plant was done. On that
day — when her body wouldn’t let her work anymore — I knew
I’d spend the rest of my life trying to honor her and make a way
for her to be as fresh and remembered as she wants to be.

Due to diabetes, Grandmama moves mostly in a wheelchair
these days, but she’s still the freshest person in my world. Visu-
ally, I’m not so fresh. I wear the same thing every day. But I am
a Southern black worker, committed to building stank-ass art
rooted in honesty, will, and imagination.

This weekend, Tm going to drive down to Grandmama’s house
in central Mississippi. I’m going to bring my computer. I’m going to
ask her to sit next to me while I finish this essay about her artistic
rituals of labor vis-a-vis OutKast. I’m going to play ATLiens and
Aquemini on her couch while finishing the piece, and think of every
conceivable way to thank her for her stank, and for her freshness.
I’m going to tell Grandmama that because of her, I know what
it’s like to be loved responsibly. I’m going to tell her that her love
helped me listen, remember, and imagine when I never wanted
to listen, remember, or imagine again. I’m going to read the last
paragraph of this piece to her, and when Grandmama hugs my
neck. I’m going to teU her that when no one in the world believed
I was a beautiful Southern black boy, she believed. I’m going to
tell Grandmama that her belief is the only reason I’m still ahve,
that belief in black Southern love is why we work.

- 32 -

WINTER 2015

THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION PRESENTS

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Photo: First Presbyterian Church; 1866; stereograph byTheodore Lilienthal; THNOC, 2010.0095.8

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PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND
WITH DEL MCCOURY BAND

- 36 -

WINTER 2015

Gram Parsons. © Jim McCrary/ Getty Images

N NOVATION —

Nudie and the
Cosmic American

BY

ELYSSA EAST

T he 1960s were coming to a close when
rising country rock musician Gram
Parsons posed next to Nudie Cohn, the
celebrated Western-wear designer more than
three times his senior. Raeanne Rubenstein
shot their portrait for Show: The Magazine
of the Arts at Nudie s Los Angeles workshop.
Over a smooth bare chest and midriff, the
twenty-something Parsons wore the suit Nudie
designed for him for the cover of the Flying
Burrito Brothers’ debut album. The Gilded
Palace of Sin. Made of white cavalry twill, it
was embroidered with crudely rendered naked
ladies, rhinestone-studded marijuana leaves,
and sequin-dotted poppies. Tuinal and Seco-
nal capsules and sugar cubes laced with LSD
decorated the sleeves. On the back shined a

giant, gleaming cross. Flames licked the sides
of both bell-bottom legs. Rubenstein ’s shutter
clicked, capturing the near-familial warmth
and affection between the two men, neither
of whom would have predicted that the suit,
which went on to help make Parsons a legend,
also foretold of his death.

Nudie, who came to Floll 3 rwood in the 1940s
and hung his hat as the “Rodeo Tailor,” was
legendary for creating what we think of today
as an iconic American look: flashy Western
high style. Born Nuta Kotlyarenko to a Jew-
ish family in Kiev, then part of the Russian
Empire, he immigrated to America in 1913,
when he was eleven, and a customs agent on
Ellis Island renamed him “Nudie Cohn.” He
went on to dress the preponderance of Hol-
lywood’s cowboys — Roy Rogers, Dale Evans,
John Wayne — as well as country music’s big-
gest stars, from Hank Williams to Johnny Cash.
Nudie ’s first designs depicted classical Western
motifs in rhinestones: cactuses, covered wag-
ons, hearts, and roses. In 1957, he designed
Elvis’s most famous outfit: the gold lame suit
the King wore on the cover of 50,000 Elvis Fans
Can’t Be Wrong. (The suit cost Elvis §10,000,
equivalent to §85,000 today.)

Many consider Parsons’s “Nudie suit” to be
the designer’s masterpiece. Nicknamed “Sin
City , ” after a song on the Burritos’ album, the
suit has been called “the Sistine Chapel ceil-
ing of cowboy attire” by Guardian critic John
Robinson. It is a study in dualities: vice and
sanctity, irony and earnestness, and country

music style and rock & roll sensibility. Aes-
thetically, it is the perfect visual expression
of Parsons’s music, which melded country to
rock and gave rise to an entirely new sound.
Bands such as the Eagles, the Doobie Broth-
ers, and later-generation artists Uncle Tupelo,
Whiskeytown, Old 97’s, and Steve Earle — and
the entire Americana and alt-country move-
ments — would be inconceivable without the
example Parsons set. Contemporary musicians
such as Jack White and Jeff Tweedy continue
to wear Nudie- and Parsons-inspired looks
to this day.

I ngram “Gram” Cecil Connor was born into a
family of wealth, thanks to his grandfather’s
citrus empire. In his native Waycross, Georgia,
he often traveled in chauffeured Cadillacs and
journeyed to Florida in plush, private train cars.
At age nine, Gram saw Elvis Presley open for
Little Jimmy Dickens at the Waycross City
Auditorium, an experience that changed the
budding musician’s life. In Twenty Thousand
Roads, a biography of Parsons, David N. Meyer
quotes Gram’s nanny, Louise Cone: “Gram
was a sweet child as long as you let him be
Elvis Presley. ”

Parsons also knew suffering. Two days
before Christmas of 1958, when Gram was
twelve, his alcoholic father, Ingram Cecil
“Coon Dog” Connor, committed suicide
with a bullet to his head. Gram moved to his
grandparents’ family compound in Winter
Haven, Florida, with his mother. Avis, and

OxfordAmerican.org

- 37 -

little sister. A few months later, Avis married
a smooth-talking, slickly dressed man named
Robert Parsons, and Gram Connor officially
became Gram Parsons.

When he was fifteen. Parsons performed
in a band called the Legends — they wore
matching red blazers and traveled to gigs in a
customized VW bus detailed with the band’s
name. Parsons, whose family had hired a man-
ager for him, traveled to Greenville, South
Carolina, to a solo gig on the Coca-Cola Hi-Fi
Club Hootenanny, where he met and joined the
Carolina-based, Journey men-inspired Shilos.
The band spent the summer after Parsons’s
Junior year in New York City playing the leg-
endary folk clubs Cafe Wha?, Cafe Rafio, and
the Bitter End. Back in Florida, on the day of
Parsons’s high school graduation in 1965, his
hard-drinking mother died from cirrhosis of
the liver.

It was a pivotal year for Parsons, who headed
to Harvard, and for American music. That sum-
mer, Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk
Festival, a move that kicked folk back to the
dustbin. Country was readily accessible across
the U.S., but as Parsons’s eventual bandmate,
guitarist John Nuese, told biographer Meyer,

“Nobody was listening to what they’d call
redneck country-western shit.”

Parsons dropped out of Harvard after one
semester, moved to New York City with his
musician friends, and formed the International
Submarine Band. While he’d had a strong
formative exposure to country in Georgia
and Florida, it was Nuese who introduced
the band to contemporary twang, including
the genre’s older, more obscure ballads and
songs. “We were discovering the depths of how
impassioned that music is,” said ISB bassist Ian
Dunlop. “It’s magnetic and terrifically poetic.
It’s the human condition exposed.”

The band spun and studied modern albums
by Bakersfield musicians Merle Haggard and
Buck Owens, as well as George Jones. Though
Parsons didn’t know him yet, Nudie had al-
ready dressed all three of these men; as his
designs matured, he made special stage suits
for artists in celebration of their greatest hits.
He embellished a black suit with moonshine
bottles and lightning bolts for Jones’s first
No. 1 country single, “White Lightning.” For
Webb Pierce’s hit version of Jimmie Rodgers’s
“In the Jailhouse Now,” Nudie covered the
front of a suit with jailhouses and on the back

embroidered a picture of Pierce strumming a
guitar behind bars.

By the spring of 1967, the ISB moved to Los
Angeles, where things finally began to come
together musically for Parsons. In 1968, the
ISB cut an album, Safe at Home, that had a
unique, countrified rock sound informed by
the band’s deep study of Americana. But before
the album was released, Gram left the group to
Join the most popular band in the country: the
Byrds. He lasted only six months. Still, it was
long enough for him to lead them to completely
change their sound for Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
which Country Music Hall of Fame writer
Peter Cooper described as “the gateway drug
to country.” Cooper also stated, “Gram turned
the Byrds from America’s most popular rock
band to one of America’s least popular country
bands.” Audiences didn’t yet know what to
make of the marriage of the two genres. Parsons
called it “Cosmic American Music.”

T he divide between rock and country held
true in fashion, as well. Pianist David Bar-
ry, who was active in the L.A. music scene,
said, “People like me wore Jeans and boots,
which is exactly what real country stars didn’t
want to wear because it suggested they came
from country’s poor white roots.” The “real”
country stars “looked like a Las Vegas Joke.”
In the late 1960s, Nudie ’s son-in-law and
head tailor Manuel Cuevas met Parsons and
enticed him into Nudie ’s shop. In addition
to working for Nudie, Manuel, who goes by
his first name professionally, was working on
crafting the Grateful Dead’s skeleton-and-roses
insignia and designing the suits for the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s album. Soon after. Parsons began
sporting Nudie ’s outlandish creations as the
visual corollary to his unique sound. Nudie
would hop in his custom Western-themed
Cadillac convertible, with pistols for door han-
dles, a hand-tooled leather dashboard covered
in silver dollars, horseshoe hood ornaments,
and steer horns Jutting forth from the front
grill, and drive to the clubs to hear the band
play. Parsons had started a new band called
the Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris Hill-
man, another ex-Byrd. “Nudie loved seeing
Gram up on the stage, sparkling and looking
so beautiful in his designs,” said photographer
Raeanne Rubenstein. When it came time for
the Burritos to record their debut album. The
Gilded Palace of Sin, Nudie was the obvious
choice to help put together their look.

Nudie and his staff made outfits for all
four of the Burritos, each to their own tastes

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and whims. Hillman, who played guitar and
shared vocals and songwriting credits with
Parsons, opted for a lush cobalt blue suit
with peacocks on the front and a giant sun
on the back. Peter “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow,
the band’s pedal steel player, requested a suit
embroidered with a pterodactyl and a tyran-
nosaurus rex. Bassist Chris Ethridge asked
that his Edwardian frock coat and pants be
covered in a classic motif of red and yellow
roses. “We talked for months and months
before we put it together,” Manuel told me.
He stitched the embroidery on Parsons’s suit
himself because Rose Clements, Nudie’s chief
embroiderer, refused to sew the pictures of
drugs and naked women.

Parsons may have been going for an au-
thentic country look, but his suit was equal-
ly tongue-in-cheek, like some of his songs.
The rhinestones and cross are in homage to
classic country culture, while the marijuana
gave a blatant middle finger to that world.
The suit cut the other way, too, celebrating
hippie drugs in high redneck style. Nudie’s
designs conveyed a subtler narrative — that
of the Southern innocent forever corrupted
by urban life. In country music, the narrator
often ends up calling the past his home, but
Parsons’s past offered no solace.

T hough now considered a classic. The Gilded
Palace of Sin sold dismally. Rolling Stone
critic and fellow Waycross native Stanley
Booth gave it a rave review and Dylan said
the album “instantly knocked me out,” but the
Burritos’ music was still too rock for country
audiences and too country for the rock set.

At the time, the album’s greatest success
belonged to Nudie — four months after Gilded's
release, he was featured on the cover of Rolling
Stone. Before long, John Lennon, Janis Joplin,
Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, and
Bootsy Collins, among others, would all wear
his styles, inspiring Western wear’s popularity
in the 1970s. But in early 1968, the Burritos
caught flack for their bedazzled attire. “Just
because we wear sequined suits doesn’t mean
we think we’re great, ” Parsons said. “It means
we think sequins are great. ”

The drugs that decorated “Sin City” even-
tually began to catch up to Parsons; he had
started using barbiturates and heroin. In April
of 1970 he released a middling second album
with the Burritos, Burrito Deluxe. Two months
later, Hillman, who was growing tired of Par-
sons’s “rock-star games, ” fired him on the spot
when he showed up late and high to a gig.

Afterward, Parsons went to hang out with
Keith Richards, with whom he’d developed
a friendship solidified by drugs and music, at
Nellcote, the French villa where the Stones
were recording Exile on Main Street. Today,
many attribute the band’s new direction on
that album to Parsons’s influence, particularly
its twangier numbers, even if the Stones did
boot him from their idyll.

Eventually, Parsons got clean enough to cut
a solo album, GP, featuring the harmonies of
Emmylou Harris, then an unknown. Rolling
Stone reviewer Bud Scoppa saw Parsons and
Harris perform during their tour, and wrote;
“That night — for me, at least — Gram Parsons
was transformed into a latter-day Hank Wil-
liams : an innovator still revering the past and
proud to be bound to it, an anguished genius
daring to use his pain as the foundation of
his art, no matter what the consequences.
He was beautiful, but there was danger in
the beauty.”

Hank Williams had been a client of Nudie’s,
and the two had grown close before Williams’s
tragic death at twenty-nine. Likewise, Parsons
and Nudie developed a strong bond. “Nudie
took him under his wing like he would a son, ”
according to the designer’s granddaughter Ja-
mie Lee Nudie. But, she remembers, Nudie’s
wife, Bobbie, often said that there was simply
something deeply sad about Parsons.

After the tour for GP, Parsons was arrested
for getting into a drunken, drug-inspired bar
fight, and Nudie bailed him out — but no one,
not even Parsons’s closest friends, could save
him from himself. “Nudie saw what was hap-
pening, and it devastated him,” said Jamie Lee.

In 1973, at twenty-six. Parsons died of an
overdose in Joshua Tree, California, right be-
fore the release of his follow-up solo effort.
Grievous Angel. Gram had traveled far in his
short life, but ultimately could not escape the
illness that also claimed his parents’ lives:
addiction.

Though Parsons is not a Country Music
Hall of Fame inductee, his Nudie suit is on
display at the museum, where it celebrates
Parsons’s and Nudie’s respective revolution-
ary approaches of conjoining two otherwise
opposing aesthetics: country and rock. Fill-
ing a glass case between two guitars, the suit
also stands as a compelling sartorial portrait
of Parsons the man and musician, the sinner
and seeker. Like much of his Cosmic American
Music, it is made all the more haunting for its
irony and beauty, and the story of its grievous
angel whose life was shot through with loss.

Down

Yonder

BY

GREG REISH

G ordon Tanner was seventeen when he
found himself thrust before a microphone,
fiddle in hand, at a makeshift Bluebird
recording studio in San Antonio’s Texas Hotel.
He was a long way from North Georgia. His
father Gid — chicken farmer, contest fiddler,
and cofounder of the original Skillet Lickers
band in 1926 — stood beside him, along with
the blind guitarist and singer Riley Puckett, a
prolific recording artist and bona fide hiUbilly
star. The rest of the band’s original lineup had
changed by 1934, leaving Gordon to take the
lead instrumental role previously occupied by
SkiUet Lickers fiddlers Clayton McMichen, Bert
Layne, and the one-handed Lowe Stokes, who
played with a prosthetic bow holder after his
right hand was shot off during a fight.

Frank Walker, the cigar-chomping A&R
man at Columbia Records who signed Bessie
Smith (and later, at MGM, Hank Williams),
is largely credited with assembling the Skillet
Lickers. Based upon his success with Smith,
Walker had been put in charge of Columbia’s new
“Old Familiar Tunes” catalog in 1925, a collec-
tion of what we would now describe as country
music. He built Columbia’s catalog swiftly and
steadily, going head-to-head with Ralph Peer’s
work at Okeh and Victor Records. In 1923, Peer
had scored the first real commercial success in
country music with his recordings of Atlanta’s
Fiddlin’ John Carson, so naturally Walker set
his sights on Gid Tanner, Garson’s rival at the
Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention.

Tanner came to New Tbrk several times in
1924 to record for Columbia, bringing his friend
Riley Puckett along with him. Within a couple
of years, Puckett became one of Walker’s big-
gest country stars, the “King of the Hillbil-
lies,” whose mellifluous baritone and power-
ful delivery proved a successful vehicle for the
parlor and novelty songs still popular in the
mid-1920s. (“We don’t need Jimmie Rodgers,”

OxfordAmerican.org

■ 39 -

Walker reportedly quipped, upon hearing Peer’s
recordings from the Bristol sessions. “We’ve got
Riley Puckett.”)

Walker liked the musical combination of
Puckett and Tanner, and saw an opportunity
to bring together two of Atlanta’s best-known
musicians to create a hit machine for his record
company. Of course, he understood that Gid’s
popularity was based largely on cut-up show-
manship rather than musical prowess, on his
ability to perform comedic tricks onstage and
imitate a wide variety of voices. To add some
fiddle chops to the group. Walker snagged Clay-
ton McMichen, a younger, hipper, and jazzier
virtuoso who had been building his own fan base
as leader of the Hometown Boys on Atlanta’s
WSB radio.

-40- WINTER 2015

Walker’s instincts paid off. From their record-
ing debut in 1926 to their departure from Colum-
bia in 1931, the Skillet Tickers were one of the
most commercially successful string bands in the
nation. Their sound was like no other — a wildly
careening juggernaut, insanely contrapuntal,
and, although their repertoire was largely made
up of dance tunes, not particularly danceable.

In the Skillet Tickers’ arrangements, two,
sometimes three, fiddles pretended to play to-
gether, but diverse abilities and stylistic chasms
kept them apart just enough to dilate the mel-
ody, replacing its clear line with a dissonant,
snaking heterophony worthy of Tibetan oboe
music. Puckett, meanwhile, took advantage of
his proximity to the microphone as lead singer
to assert his powerful and eccentric bass-string

runs on guitar, deliberately letting his phrasing
fall out of sync with that of the fiddles. As each
musician vied for attention, it was a thrilling
contest of wills, an electrifying and precarious
frenzy. Even today, the joy and excitement of
listening to those classic Columbia sides he in
the music’s inherent instability, the feeling that
the whole enterprise might come crashing down
at any moment.

By the time Gordon Tanner joined the group,
it was the dark days of the Depression, and the
raucous bands that had been so popular over the
previous decade — none more than the Skillet
Tickers — were losing their appeal in the face of
country crooners, cowboy singers, and sweet
brother duets. But this music was Gordon’s fam-
ily legacy. The Bluebird session was as much
a beginning for him as it was a swan song for
hillbilly music’s first supergroup.

The first sign of its decline had come in 1931 ,
when Clayton McMichen left the group to form
the Georgia Wildcats, a more swing-oriented
group that included, for a time, a young Merle
Travis. After the 1934 recording session in San
Antonio, the Skillet Tickers’ commercial vi-
ability as a professional old-time string band
continued to wane. Even so, Gid and Gordon
kept the group going, through the lean years
of the war and the postwar rise of horrky-tonk,
bluegrass, and, eventually, the Nashville Sound.

Gordon was an excellent fiddler, and he ac-
companied his father at small-time gigs around
northeast Georgia, the two of them usually
picking up musicians from a loose network of
acquaintances along the way. (For years, the
region was littered with dozens of former Skil-
let Tickers.) They played on the steps of the
Gwinnett County courthouse, for area dances
and church gatherings, and hosted regular jam
sessions in the Chicken House — a real chicken
house turned musical man cave — at their family’s
homestead in Dacula.

After Gid died in 1960, Gordon continued
these traditions, bringing his son Phil and grand-
son Russ into the family music-making. Banjoist
Uncle John Patterson and guitarist Smokeyjoe
Miller, who had played with Riley Puckett and
understood that idiosyncratic style as well as
anyone, became regular Skillet Tickers. Soon,
a young professor from the university over in
Athens started showing up with his banjo and
tape machine.

I t was a warm evening in May 2015 when I
turned off Georgia 316, the bustling and soul-
less four-lane highway that runs by warehouses
and the Gwinnett County Airport as it cuts a

“Person with Guitar (Green),” by John Baldcssari. Courtesy of the artist

dreary concrete path between Atlanta and Ath-
ens. I was headed toward Gid Tanner’s old place
in Dacula for the Skillet bickers’ annual Spring
Cookout: part church supper, part festival con-
cert, and part family backyard party.

When 1 arrived, I found Russ Tanner in cargo
shorts, flipping burgers and pushing hot dogs
around a propane grill. As the current flddler
and occasional mandolinist of the Skillet bick-
ers, Russ is the most accomplished musician
of the group. He and his father, Phil, lead the
band in its present formation; Russ’s grown boy.
Josh, who would have been the fifth-generation
Tanner to join up, doesn’t play music, though
he’s got a talent for promotion and helped to
organize and publicize the cookout. Russ intro-
duced me to their Dobro player. Fleet Stanley,
nephew of Roba Stanley, one of the first women
to record country music. Then Russ told me
about the time he got to play great-grandpap’s
fiddle at the Country Music Hall of Fame in
Nashville, bike Gordon before him, Russ knows
that the history of country music is the story
of his family.

Art Rosenbaum, who’d driven over from Ath-
ens, ambled up silently as Russ and I talked over
the grill. A smallish man with wisps of gray hair

tucked under a tight-fitting baseball cap. Art is
a living legend of traditional Georgia culture.
An extraordinary banjo player and singer and
a prolific documenter of the old-time and folk
music of the region, he came to Georgia from
the University of Iowa in 1976 to teach paint-
ing at UGA and he’s known the Tanner family
ever since, bike many of his generation. Art
came to old-time music by way of the urban
folk revival, then spent the next half-century
collecting ballads, spirituals, fiddle music, and
blues directly from their homegrown sources. In
2007, a retrospective of his collecting career. Art
of Field Recording, was issued by Atlanta-based
Dust-to-Digital. The following year it won the
Grammy for Best Historical Album.

A Jew from upstate New Tbrk who grew up
in Indiana, Rosenbaum has always been right at
home among the Tanners, their extended family,
and their conservative Christian community,
where music is what brings people together —
the shared love for the traditions, the common
ground. He’s a rare outsider who has made him-
self an insider, wholly and sincerely. For Art, the
music and the people are inseparable.

He told me about his discovery, upon arriv-
ing in Georgia forty years before, that Gordon

Tanner had kept his father’s legendary band
alive. Art shared stories of their jam sessions,
of the Skillet bickers recordings he produced.
“Their sound changed,” he explained. “They
still do some of the old numbers that Gid and
Riley liked to do, but they picked up lots of
bluegrass and other modem sounds along the
way.” During a recent show, he asked the man
sitting next to him what he thought of the per-
formance. “Pretty good, but they don’t sound
like the Skillet bickers,” the neighbor replied.
“What do you mean?” Art exclaimed. “They
are the Skillet bickers!”

After moving through the buffet line, a typi-
cal assortment of chips, slaw, baked beans, and
broccoli salad laid out on folding tables near the
top of the grassy hiU, the modest-sized audience,
about fifty people, spread out in folding camp
chairs under the shade of oak and sycamore trees.
The band started up with little fanfare and began
to work through a few Skillet bickers hoedown
favorites like “Rocky Pallet” and “Down Yon-
der,” interspersed with classic country songs
and a couple of bluegrass numbers. On fiddle,
Russ guided the band confidently through the
material on one of the outstanding instmments
made by his father. Then Phil took the lead vocal

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and Russ showcased his fiddling on “Listen to
the Mockingbird,” a holdover from nineteenth-
century parlor music and a crowd favorite with
its ornithological catalog of trills, glissandi,
harmonics, and other fiddle effects.

Though Art has heard the Skillet Tickers
countless times and knows their current sound
and repertoire, he treated the show as anything
but routine. He moved toward the front of the
stage, set up his compact camping stool, and
pulled a brick-sized portable digital recorder,
stereo microphone, and headphones from the
outside pockets of his banjo case. Checking
levels, he spoke quietly into the microphone
to register the date and location, then sat still,
attention undivided, to capture the performance
of an old-time string band entering its ninetieth
consecutive year.

Phil and Russ eventually called on Art to grab
his banjo and join them, which he was happy
to do. Art played energetically in the old claw-
hammer style, the way Uncle John Patterson
used to play with Gordon Tanner. Then Russ
reminded Phil that they had another special
musical guest, and Phil laughed at himself for
having aheady forgotten the guest’s name. Grab-
bing my guitar, I climbed onstage, positioning

myself between Art and Russ, and launched into
“Way Downtown.”

A homemade sign on the door to the Chicken
House reads est. 1955. It’s not an open-air
structure like many coops, but essentially a small
rectangular house, with solid walls and a real
roof. Russ refers to the place as his “garage,”
where he spends much of his free time when
he’s not on the road for his day job as a sales rep
for a box divider company. He took me inside
to show me his recording setup, anchored by a
surprisingly large mixing board and an old com-
puter. At the opposite end of the house there’s a
self-serve snack bar with candy and a few other
items; I grabbed a Skillet Tickers sticker for my
guitar case and left two dollars in the fish bowl.

The Chicken House is covered with memora-
bilia, most of it dusty and under glass. In a large
painting by Rosenbaum, Gordon and Phil play
their fiddles, and in the background Art rendered
a famous photograph of Gid Tanner and Fiddlin’
John Garson standing outside the Georgia Old-
Time Fiddlers’ Convention at the old Atlanta
Auditorium. The original framed photo hangs
on a nearby wall along with most of the extant
photos of Gid. Inside a glass case a Gibson oval-

hole guitar lies across a publicity photo of Riley
Puckett, although it’s not an instrument that he
played. Framed 78s with labels from Columbia
and Bluebird are hung on the wall in a somewhat
haphazard arrangement. There’s an upright piano
that looks like it hasn’t been touched in decades,
topped with a fiddle, an oil lamp, and a couple
cans of bug spray.

Back outside, Phil packed PA. equipment into
the back of his truck, and I offered to lend a hand.
I’ve played with all kinds of old-time musicians
and bands, but getting to play with the Skillet
Tickers — a band I’ve loved and studied for years, a
band whose origins are the mythic stuff of coun-
try music’s very inception — gave me a special
sense of gratification, a palpable connection to
history. Phil told me about Country Music Down
Yonder, the theatrical presentation he and Russ
put together. Dressed like 1920s mobsters, band
members depict the various figures involved in
the Skillet Tickers’ creation: Gid, Riley, Clayton,
and even Frank Walker. Phil is proud of the show
because it teUs his story, the legacy handed down
to him from his father and grandfather, and that,
in turn, he’s passed on to his kids. “I’mnot doing
this because I’m an actor or historian,” he said.
“I do it because this is who we are.”

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- 42 -

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WILL STEPHENSON

E llenwood is a small suburb only twenty
minutes from East Atlanta, but MC Shy
D has always considered it “the country. ”
It does have a pastoral quality. On a Friday night
in June, it was muggy and green and quiet, and
you could stand outside on the patio of the
Sports Zone — the bar and grill where Shy D
DJs on weekend nights — and watch fireflies
disappear and reappear across the mostly empty
parking lot.

The Sports Zone occupies the far corner of a
dilapidated strip mall, next to a karate school, a
Little Caesars Pizza, and a hair salon called The
Devil Is A Liar. Inside, the place was dark, awash
in pinks and oranges from neon beer logos and a
couple of muted TV s . A line of women sat at the
bar playing with their hair or leaning over their
phones, bored, while six or seven men huddled
around the pool table in stern concentration.
Shy D was stationed in the back comer behind
his equipment, holding court. “Friday night at
the Sports Zone,” he said smoothly into the
mic. “Free Flow Fridays, you already know.”
No one much reacted to this, but he seemed
satisfied to have said it.

Shy D, who was born Peter Jones, is large-
bodied, bald, and perpetually mellow, with gold
front teeth and a slack, friendly expression. That
night he wore a plain green t-shirt and blue
jeans, his insulin pump attached to his helt (he
was diagnosed with diabetes three years ago).
Vbu can find him here on weekend nights from
nine to two, a shift for which he is paid a fiat rate
of two hundred dollars. You can tell it is him
because the owner of the place, Angel, had his
name installed on the wall in the comer: MC SHY
D in big brass letters. It was a coup to get him
here, she will tell you, and they are understand-
ably proud of his residency.

This is the man, after all, who brought hip-
hop to Atlanta. Or anyway, he brought Atlanta
to hip-hop — in the mid-eighties, he was the

first rapper from the city to break out of it, to
tour the country and make a name for himself.
Fie became an object of adulation to the whole
region: If you was ridin’, you was humping to
bomie Shy D, as Jermaine Dupri put it on “Wel-
come to Atlanta” over a decade ago. Wherever
he went. Shy D carried the gospel of Atlanta
with him, though these days it’s easy to wonder
if the city has forgotten him. He plays other
people’s songs now, at this neighborhood bar
around the corner from where he grew up. In a
year, he will be fifty.

“I listen to the radio every day,” he was
telling me. I’d asked him what he thought of
contemporary Atlanta rap. “Me being a DJ, I
gotta keep up with what’s current. I don’t got
no problem with the young boys. ” His voice is
oddly high-pitched and melodious, just as it

is on his records. While he talked, he gripped
one ear of his white Beats by Dre headphones,
occasionally reaching over the table to half-
heartedly scratch the song back and forth. “Vbu
gotta be a DJ with an open ear, ” he said, tapping
the headphones. “You can’t be a DJ with a bitter
heart.” With that, he cued up OutKast’s “Git
Up, Git Out” and gripped the mic to sing along
with every other line.

H ip-hop was born in the South Bronx, and so
was Peter Jones. He was there to witness it,
though he wouldn’t be in the foreground of any
of the classic photos from the period — he was a
kid, bom in ’66. He would be in the back of the
photograph, or off to the side, a ten-year-old
in hand-me-down Reeboks, looking up at the
older kids in awe. Carrying their record crates.

- 44 -

WINTER 2015

Illustration of MC Shy D by Justin Mclcan Wheeler

untangling their power cords. “Believe it or not,
it was beautiful,” he told me of this period. He’s
constantly prefacing things that way — “believe
it or not.” 1 tend to believe him.

He was the youngest of three children. His
mother worked for the telephone company,
and his father manned the assembly line at a
General Motors plant, fitting the trim on back
windshields. They lived a few floors up in the
storied Bronx River Projects, a circle of bland
fourteen-story brick structures surrounding
playgrounds and asphalt parks. In the early
seventies, it was the site of an unending series
of battles between local gang the Black Spades
and their rivals: among others, there were the
Ministers, a white gang formed at Stevenson
High School, and the Seven Crowns, who re-
portedly once waged war with the Spades for
ninety-two straight days. In those years, ac-
cording to historian Steven Hager, the Bronx
River Projects were “constantly peppered with
gunfire from passing cars.” Many called it Li’l
Vietnam.

Things began to change in the mid-seven-
ties, due partly to the efforts of a first-floor
resident and amateur DJ whom everyone
knew as Afrika Bambaataa. An eccentric who
had grown up hunting rabbits with bows and
arrows along the banks of the Bronx River,
Bambaataa abandoned the Black Spades after
his best friend was murdered by the police
in 1975. Inspired by a viewing of the 1964
film Zulu (starring Michael Caine), he created
the Zulu Nation, which aimed to perpetuate
the community service angle of the earlier
gangs — even the Black Spades had helped reg-
ister voters and raise money for sickle-cell
anemia — without the bloodshed. The Nation
also worked security at the parties Bambaataa
began hosting in the housing project’s com-
munity center, where Jones was barely old
enough to go and watch him spin. What Shy
D remembers better than these formal sets
were the hot afternoons on which Bambaataa
wouldn’t bother to rent out the center, but
would instead hoist a speaker up to his win-
dow and spontaneously play records for the
whole neighborhood. This was hip-hop’s lar-
val, laboratory stage, when it was essentially a
celebration of the easy accessibility of diverse
recorded media. Bambaataa would play Kraft-
werk and James Brown and the Monkees, the
theme song from The Pink Panther.

Years later, Shy D would claim to be Bam-
baataa’s cousin, a piece of trivia that’s been re-
peated in almost everything written about him
since, though it isn’t strictly true. He says the

ruse was Bambaataa’s idea: the Godfather of
Hip-Hop heard “Lil Pete Jones from the proj-
ects” was making waves down in Georgia and
thought the association would give him a leg
up. Either way, it gives you a sense of how
important his Bronx heritage was to him. “I
was right there at the birth of it,” Shy D says,
and he really was. For a while, his older sister
even went out with Keith “Gowboy” Wiggins
of the Furious Five, the guy often credited with
coining the term “hip-hop.” We can forgive him
for being proud.

If Shy D was too young to do more than
watch, his older siblings were deeply engaged
in the burgeoning scene. “My brother and sister
was so treacherous up there,” is how he put
it, citing constant fights and trouble with the
law, which prompted the family’s move down
South in 1978 (still a year out from the release
of the earliest hip-hop records). Shy D’s father
had grown up in Perry, Georgia, and had fond
memories of the state — the trees, the climate.
They settled in Ellenwood, and Shy D loved
it immediately. “In New York, everybody’s on
top of everybody,” he said. “There’s too many
people. Every time my mom and dad bought us a
bike, somebody stole it.” Atlanta was different,
he said. It was “the country.”

T he story of Atlanta rap begins, technically,
in South Garolina. The Augusta metro area
extends warily across the eastern Georgia bor-
der to include the county of Aiken, home to
the studios of an urban radio station that used
to be known as WZZW There, one Saturday
night in 1979, a DJ named Danny Hankinson
played Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”
for the first time and decided it would sound
better in outer space.

Hankinson was an Aiken native, the son of a
minister, and a foster father of three. He DJed
at supper clubs and skating rinks in and around
Augusta under the name Danny Renee, and
while he didn’t recognize “Rapper’s Delight” as
any kind of cultural milestone — he wasn’t even
sure what to call it, opting for “rhyming song”
in an interview with the local newspaper — he
knew it was a hit, and that he wanted to make
one of his own. “I played it on my Saturday
show and liked it and decided to write one my-
self,” he told the paper. He held auditions at a
local high school and enlisted three teenagers
to accompany him to the Melody Recording
Service in Atlanta, where they recorded “Space
Rap” (credited to Danny Renee & The Charisma
Crew), a song that’s both utterly inexplicable
and strangely prophetic.

It’s probably dangerous to declare anything
the “first” of a particular genre from a given city,
but “Space Rap” is by some margin the earliest
Atlanta rap single I’ve ever heard. As it was
based so directly on the song that singlehand-
edly popularized hip-hop in the first place, it’s
hard to imagine how anyone else could have
beaten Hankinson to the punch. Fifteen years
before OutKast declared themselves ATLiens
or began a song with a mechanized “Greetings,
earthlings,” Hankinson was already follow-
ing the same muse: “What’s happening, earth-
lings?” his record begins, in a robotic vocoder
monotone. “There is no need for alarm.”
“Space Rap” was an anomaly. In the early
eighties, the Atlanta music scene was stiU domi-
nated by funk groups like Brick, the S.O.S.
Band, and Cameo. The only local rapper with
any real profile before Shy D was Mo-Jo, a sort
of outsider artist who emerged with a 1982
novelty single called “Battmann: Let Mo-Jo
Handle It,” featuring a kazoo interpolation of
the Batman theme song. “He never made it
past the Georgia state line,” Shy D said of Mo-
jo, laughing. “He’s doing great though. He’s
worked at UPS for like twenty-seven years, so
shit, he about to retire.”

We were talking at a pizza place called
Gino’s, one of Shy D’s favorite spots. It was
about one in the morning, and he’d arrived
with his friends Deando, an aspiring rapper,
and Big Marc, a tow-truck driver who toured
with Shy D years ago and later managed one
of the other great early Georgia MCs, Hitman
Sammy Sam. Shy D was talking about the
start of his career, which struck him as absurd
in retrospect. He’d been a working DJ since
junior high, but after high school he got a job
parking cars at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead
(he parked Jesse Jackson’s car, the Whispers’
tour bus). Soon he was spending late nights
at Club Phoenix and even later nights at the
Charles Disco out on Simpson Road (“a li’l
spot where young men and young women
go to experience their first little taste of the
nightlife,” as Andre 3000 once described the
place). About a year into the parking job, he
won a contest and wound up the opening act at
a gig for Gigolo Tony and Lacey Lace, where he
impressed their manager, an A&R woman for
the upstart Miami Bass label 4-Sight. She of-
fered him a deal that night, and the next day he
caught a Greyhound headed for South Florida.
This was a glorious time. “When I got down
there — and I’m not trying to be funny — ”
he told me, “I saw the fucking women, and
I went crazy. The reason I say that is, Miami

OxfordAmerican.org

■ 45 -

got a certain type of woman.” He leaned back
and closed his eyes, revisiting the beach of
his memory. “It was like God said, I’m gonna
bless you.”

In a studio in Fort Lauderdale, the owner
of 4-Sight, a former bail bondsman named
Billy Hines, asked Shy D if he had any ideas
for his first single. He did. He played him the
Fink Panther theme song (a nod to Bambaataa),
banged out a rhythm on a table for producer
Frank “Thumbs” Cornelius, and began rap-
ping about his own place in history. He called
it “Rapp Will Never Die,” an odd claim for a
genre still more or less in its infancy. His line of
thinking was, he says; It’s not gonna die, because
it's my turn now. Unexpectedly, to everyone but
Shy D, the song blew up. It was immediate.
Atlanta now had something to say, it seemed,
and its voice was high-pitched and proud and
lurid. Shy D found himself touring the South-
east and making real money. It was beautiful, he
told me, with a smile that showed off his gold
teeth, “until I started fucking my manager.”

This was 1986. One night Shy D was running
late for a sound check at a Miami nightclub
called the Bass Station, an extravagant temple
to low-end frequencies, with “about fifty-two

speakers” on each side of the stage. He got a
call from the club’s owner, Norberto Morales,
a reputed coke dealer nicknamed Candyman,
who was growing impatient. “I’m paying your
ass $5,000,” Morales told him, “1 need your ass
here.” This was news to Shy D, who thought his
rate was only $1,500. Blowing off the concert
altogether, he went home to confront his man-
ager, and now girlfriend, whom he blamed for
the misunderstanding. They got into a shouting
match, and he called himself a cab. That was the
end of his relationship with 4- Sight Records.

Fortunately Shy D had already made a fan
out of a promoter named Luther Campbell, a
former DJ already emerging as a Miami music
scene mogul. Though he would later become
better known for other things — getting sued
by George Lucas, running unsuccessfully for
mayor — Campbell was first and foremost a
Southern hip-hop pioneer, and he got word
to Shy D that he was interested in adding him
to his stable of artists at Luke Skyywalker Re-
cords, a roster anchored then by the group 2 Live
Crew, who had not yet become internationally
infamous for the First Amendment victories
they’d achieve in defense of songs like “Me So
Horny.” Shy D signed the contract, and within

a year he’d released his first two albums, Got to
Be Tough and Comin ’ Correct in 88.

The first was blunt and complicated and
rugged — a notable hit on the independent mu-
sic charts — but the second was a genuine leap
forward, an audible departure from Shy D’s
New York roots in favor of something grimier,
loopier, more distinctly Southern. He’d re-
cruited new collaborators, Mike Fresh and DJ
Toomp, and the three of them posed on the
album cover in University of Georgia gear, with
Shy D in front taking a knee. They conceived the
album together in Shy D’s parents’ basement,
where he was still living, and recorded it in a
studio owned by his friends in the reggae band
Inner Circle (who at the time were recording
“Bad Boys,” the future theme song to Cops). For
the first time, on Cornin’ Correct, Atlanta was
presented as a point of pride, an imaginative
space of possibility. The people all over want to
know where I be, he rapped on “Atlanta That’s
Where 1 Stay.” Not in New York, in the cold
drinking Fanta. But coolin’ down south where
it’s hot, in Atlanta.

S hy D still lived with his parents after the
albums came out, but he expanded his car

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• 46 -

WINTER 2015

collection and happily spent money on other
people. Wednesday through Saturday nights,
he would take a dozen of his closest friends
out on the town, everyone on his tab. “When
you’re making money,” he explained, “you
don’t think it’ll never stop.” Other homegrown
rappers were beginning to emerge, and Shy D
saw them as harbingers of a new generation,
one he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. Kilo,
Raheem the Dream, the Hard Boyz — they were
colder, less cartoonish, and more interested
in telegraphing a form of brash authenticity
that didn’t come as naturally to him. He felt
threatened, and they in turn openly resented
his success. “One thing I noticed about At-
lanta,” he remembers, “these motherfuckers
here were very jealous. Don’t nobody want to
see nobody bigger than them.”

Local rap radio was cliquish and fickle, and
often seemed to deliberately ignore Shy D,
which stung. But he had the support of the only
tastemaker who mattered; Edward Landrum,
a.k.a. King Edward J, a record store owner who
wore a wide-brimmed black hat, rolled his R’s
prominently, and spoke in a rhyming patois
of his own invention (Z am the king, doing my
thing, making Decatur sound much grrreater).
Landrum was a kind of carnival barker who
distributed an ongoing series of influential “J
Tapes,” establishing the Atlanta hip-hop canon
in real time. Shy D was a mainstay, so his local
esteem was secure.

Any number of subtle maneuvers can de-
rail a music career, however, and Shy D made
a lot of them in short succession. Some not
so subtle. First, he left the Luke label, losing
their distribution and promotional networks.
He had his reasons for leaving — “He had a
suspicion he wasn’t getting everything he was
owed; his royalty statements would show a
negative balance while his records were on the
Billboard chart," his attorney, Richard Wolfe,
told reporters years later, when Shy D decided
to sue — but the move nevertheless cost him.
“I killed my goddamn self,” he told me of this
decision. “My career went from here” — he
held his hand over his head — “to here,” he
said, slapping his palm down hard on the table.

Right then, at this crucial moment of transi-
tion, with a whole lot riding on what he de-
cided to do next: he shot someone. It happened
in the parking lot outside of a club in Atlanta.
The man was yelling and pressing him and
insulting him. An Ellenwood native — Shy D
had known him for years. The shooting, he
is quick to point out, was both nonfatal and
justified. “He was a big bully. One of those

Talking Drum #1

Senegamhia, West Africa, c. 18th century

BY

HONOREE FANONNE
JEFFERS

In his call to the marketplace

the griot urges the skin clasps

the first beat He will eat tonight

for his message I am listening

Code of the village that I left

What do you bear Uh

The journey to the sea’s

moneyed beauty Proverbs

in my footsteps Teeth are white

but sit in a bed of blood There are

many at the market A noble

is accused of heresy A man mortgaged

his nephew and bought a lovely

farm The pulls the skin

sings tension on the air Tomorrow

there will be war He will

beat on smoke and wood

Who is coming Uh The women

brought hot peppers

The fishes’ eyes cry clearly

kind of motherfuckers who’ll come up to you,
slap you, and when he slaps you, he’s digging
through your pockets. He had everybody terror-
ized.” The judge disagreed: aggravated assault.
Shy D went to prison.

I t was close to three a.m. now, and Gino’s was
quiet and nearly emptied out. We were sitting
outside on the patio, with a postcard view of the
downtown Atlanta skyline, brightly lit up for
whatever goes on in those buildings overnight.
Shy D talked about old music for a while longer,
about how Atlanta had changed, about fishing.
We talked about what he had planned for the
next day, before his DJ shift: “I like to nap all
day before 1 work,” he said. “I’m lazy like that. ”
He was stalling, because the rest of the story
isn’t great. It’s not over, and it gets better toward
the end, but there were hardships suffered along
the way. He was only in prison for a couple of
years, but these were important years. And af-
ter he got out, in 1993, Shy D never entirely
regained his footing in the scene. He had some
local hits, songs like “True to the Game,” in the
video for which he appeared in a convict’s striped
Jumpsuit. He performed at the citywide street
party Freaknik at Piedmont Park — that was a

highlight. But he was on the outgoing tide dur-
ing a sea change, and he knew it. He remembers
sharing a couple of billings with a young Out-
Kast around 1994, precocious teenagers, new
to the industry. They were polite, respectful,
earnest. Andre 3000, especially, seemed “Just
happy to be there,” Shy D recalled. Their music
boasted a level of sophistication that was both
an expansion of his own achievements and a
rejection of them. He couldn’t help but admire
it. “Believe it or not, Dre’s mom used to work
with my dad at General Motors,” he told me,
kind of dreamily. “My dad knew his mom.”
Shy D went broke, and quickly. In a few years,
he burned through his settlement with Luther
Gampbell, which was substantial ($1.62 mil-
lion, according to Billboard) . There were the
lawyer fees, the cars, a new place for his parents,
a condo in Stone Mountain. “I Just live a carefree
life, man,” he told me. “I don’t cherish shit.
Only thing I didn’t know was that this thing
would come to an end.” This was rock bottom.
He tried selling crack for a while, only to people
he knew. When that dried up. Shy D and his
friend Big Marc settled into a new routine selling
bootleg DVDs outside of a check-cashing place,
making about $40 a day, then retiring to a Ghi-

nese restaurant around the corner. Atlanta rap,
meanwhile, was gathering steam as a national
phenomenon. “I said to myself, this music shit
is a younger man’s game now. It’s time for me to
move on and do other things. I kinda Just lost
the love for it.”

Shy D was never bitter. If anything, he seems
indifferent, even upbeat about the arc of his
career. “Tbu did what you did once upon a time,”
he said, shrugging, “but it’s over. These young
kids don’t think about me. They don’t give a fuck
about Shy D. Shy who?” There are indications
this might be changing. Overseas, in Europe,
his tapes are collectors’ items — they care about
history there, he says. Not long ago, he was
invited to appear in a VHl documentary about
Atlanta hip-hop. He laughs when he talks about
these things — he sees the humor in it. But I get
the sense that there are still too many nights
like the recent Friday he mentioned more than
once, when a fledgling young rapper approached
his booth at the Sports Zone and held out a
CD, insisting he should play it. Shy D’s friend
Deando was there and raised his arm to block
the boy, saying, “Don’t you know who this
is?” The kid didn’t even flinch. “Teah,” he said.
“He’s the DJ.”

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- 48 -

WINTER 2015

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Lead Me
Home

BY

DOM FLEMONS

T o send him home, Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. requested a modern gospel com-
position performed by its greatest singer.
In 1968, Mahalia Jackson sang out of pain,
she sang out of praise, at both the funeral at

Ebenezer Baptist Church and the memorial
at Morehouse College. She was a large black
woman with a kind and pleasant face. When
she opened her voice and unleashed this power-
ful praise music, she vocalized the sentiments
that form the foundation of the modern black
church:

Precious Lord, take my hand,

Lead me on, let me stand.

I’m tired. I’m weak. I’m ’lone.

Through the storm, through the night.

Lead me on to the light.

Take my band, precious Lord,

Lead me home.

Though often mistaken for a hymn, “Take
My Hand, Precious Lord” is a copyrighted
composition. If you were to see the sheet mu-
sic displayed on an upright piano in church.

you would see the name Thomas A. Dorsey,
songwriter and pianist, who wrote it in 1932.
Dorsey was born in 1899 in Villa Rica, Geor-
gia, which he described as “a little settlement
there where they had a few stores and the train
came through. ” His father was a gifted trav-
eling preacher and his mother played organ
in church, staying within the written music
of the hymnbook — young Dorsey learned to
play the organ organically, by observing her.
In childhood he was exposed to two contrast-
ing styles of music. One style was that of his
mother: shape-note singing and hymns that
were available in mainstream church hymnals.
He also heard improvised songs that had links
to slavery and which were still vibrant in the
black communities of rural Georgia.

When he invented modern gospel, years
later, Dorsey created a bridge between those
worlds. He wrote songs like a bluesman because

- 50 -

WINTER 2015

“Marching Band, MLK Jr Parade” (2012), by Carson Sanders

he was a bluesman. And he taught choirs to
sing that way: calling to God, guided by the
musical structure of the blues.

I n 1908, the Dorseys moved to Atlanta in
search of new opportunities. Thomas took
a job as a concession boy at the 81 Theatre
downtown, where he learned from the house
pianists who played for silent films and stage
shows. When he was a teenager, he read the
Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper
that presented commentaries about the racial
injustices of the South. The paper encouraged
its readership to consider moving to Chicago
for a better life. This appealed to Dorsey, and he
relocated there in the fall of 1916, with plans to
develop his craft in the winerooms and house
parties of the city’s blossoming music scene.

A few years after he moved, Dorsey met
a fellow who would change his life: J. Mayo
“Ink” Williams, the talent scout for Paramount
Records. Williams saw recording star potential
in a black vaudeville stage veteran named Ma
Rainey. In 1923, he asked her to record for
Paramount. Rainey asked Dorsey to form her
tour band. He said yes, arranging the songs and
teaching the band how to play them, showcas-
ing three types of music: the vaudeville and
pop Ma Rainey was known for; the blues she
recorded for Paramount; and Southern “hot”
Jazz, a new phenomenon at the time. Dorsey
assumed the stage name Georgia Tom, the group
was called the Wild Cats Jazz Band, and the
show took off.

The band rocked crowds every night in the-
aters all over the Midwest and the South, where
there was a hunger and a need for authentic
black blues performance. Ma Rainey brought
something wholly new to the concert experi-
ence of down-home blues. Up to that point,
this music had been confined to low-grade black
theaters and hole-in-the-wall rent parties. Now
it emerged in mainstream black theaters.

D orsey had renewed his faith in the church
at a 1921 National Baptist Convention
in Chicago, where he was moved by one of
the singing evangelists who added embellish-
ments and subtleties to the music written on
paper. The nature of structured improvisation
hit Dorsey to the core. “My inner being was
thrilled,” he said. “My soul was a deluge of
divine rapture; my emotions were aroused;
my heart was inspired to become a singer and
worker in the Kingdom of the Lord — and im-
press people Just as this great singer did that
Sunday morning.”

• •

Let us share our song

WITH YOU.

/

f

Music is an elemental part of life in and around Carrollton, Georgia.
It’s in the soil. It’s in the water. It’s in the air. Mostly, it’s in the
people. Influential musicians like the Father of Gospel Music,
Thomas A. Dorsey, Zac Brown and Babbie Mason have called our
community home. Events such as Little Big Jam and the Thomas
Dorsey Gospel and Blues festivals and performances in venues
such as the Amp and the Mill amphitheaters, Lowell Opry House,
Copeland Hall, the Carrollton Cultural Art Center and Mill Town
Music Hall bring people from all over to share the vibe. Restaurants
and clubs host live bands and solo performers with eclectic music
and dining menus to satisfy a broad range of appetites.

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Dorsey again turned to God when he suf-
fered a nervous breakdown in 1926. He quit Ma
Rainey’s band. His idea was to write songs that
would preach the word of the Lord while using
the structure, form, and nuances of the blues. “If
You See My Savior” was his first gospel blues.
He copyrighted the song and distributed it to
churches in Chicago. He elicited help from his
family and fellow church patrons to mail promo
copies and sell the sheet music door to door.

Though the gospel publishing business start-
ed slow, it would prove to be a smart move; as
the demand for the blues began to die down, the
demand for black sacred music began to rise. Mi-
chael Harris writes in The Rise of Gospel Blues:
The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the
Urban Church, “By the early 1930s, the scene
in old-line black urban churches had become
that of a perplexing potpourri of white main-
line Protestant and Southern Afro-American
religious rituals. Neither group seemed able to
claim an entire worship to its liking.” Gospel
blues represented a “new mode of religious ex-
pression. ” As he began to introduce the gospel
blues into the church music communities of
Chicago, Dorsey was an innovator, the only
game in town. Alas, it was impossible for him

to support himself selling sheet music.

In 1928, Dorsey met a young guitarist named
Hudson Whittaker, better known as Tampa
Red. Tampa Red was another Georgia boy; he
was from Smithville, a town near Columbus. As
Georgia Tom, Dorsey began to collaborate with
Tampa Red, making it big with “It’s Tight Like
That,” performed in a humorous style that came
to be called hokum. Business was good. Georgia
Tom’s rollicking barrelhouse piano combined
with Tampa Red’s slide guitar, creating a sound
that was unlike anything else on record.

A source of great happiness in Dorsey’s life
was his wife, Nettie Harper, whom he met
when he was twenty-six. They were married
during one of his breaks from touring with Ma
Rainey, then Nettie joined the band on the road
as wardrobe mistress. After Dorsey had the
nervous breakdown, she supported the family,
working in a laundry by day and nursing her
husband by night. By 1932, they finally had
some financial stability. But Dorsey’s world
collapsed when Nettie died in childbirth. Their
newborn son died the next day. Out of this
tragedy came Dorsey’s greatest composition.
He eased his pain by composing at the piano.

tinkering with and adapting a hymn written in
1852, “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?” He
asked a friend, the pianist and composer Theo-
dore Frye, for his reaction to the new song. In
response to Dorsey’s lyrics, Frye said, “Don’t
call Him ‘Blessed Lord.’ Call Him ‘Precious
Lord.’” Dorsey took heed. While he didn’t
know it yet, he had created a song that would
outshine all his compositions. Harris writes,
“The marriage of Dorsey’s musical and textual
voices, as represented by the composition of
‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord,’ amounted to
the final resolution of the warring interpersonal
dualities in Dorsey’s life. ” Dorsey had written
a blues text set to gospel music.

An ambitious performer and businessman
who’d spent years trying to profit from his
compositions, Dorsey was finally able to use
his drive to glorify God. He’d found solace in
his newest and greatest creation. Now, he just
needed to find someone to sing the song.

After seeking out several vocalists, Dorsey
thought of Mahalia Jackson, whom he had met
in 1928. He was impressed by her ability to
win over a crowd with her charismatic nature;
he felt she created a sense of community with
each performance. Yet Dorsey also saw that she

- 52 -

WINTER 2015

needed work to reach her full potential. She
could get the audience “patting their hands,”
as he said, hut she could not cut deep into
their hearts like a blues singer. Of course,
this was Dorsey’s specialty, and hy 1932 he
had plenty of practice coaching sacred and
secular performers.

“Take My Hand, Precious Lord” would he
Dorsey’s legacy not only because of the song
itself or because of Mahalia Jackson’s eventual
performance. (Jackson is still considered the
true personification of gospel music.) The
powerful sound of gospel came from the natu-
ral voices of a people who had been repressed
for many years, in and out of their own com-
munities. Gospel gave the hlack community
a freedom they had never before had.

As 1932 gave way to 1933, Dorsey was
elected the first director of the National Con-
vention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses. It
had been nearly one year since the death of
his wife and child. From this new position, he
would organize gospel choruses and continue
to write songs — four hundred in all, up until
his death on January 23, 1993. He never re-
turned to playing the blues or hokum. As he
put it, “this is better over here where I am.”

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OxfordAmerican.org

■ 53 -

- 54 -

Gregg Allman with a portrait of his brother (1975). © Ken Regan. Courtesy of Morrison Hotel Gallery

THE.

F 0 R E V E R

AMANDA PETRUSICH

■ 55 -

★

I had this idea that I could arrive in

Macon, Georgia, via rental sedan,
nose around for a day or two, and
figure something out about the
South, and rock music in the South,
and men in the South, and men, and death,
and guitars, and the Allman Brothers Band,
who, in the late 1960s, engineered a new style
of rock music that was deeply and earnestly
influenced by rhythm & blues but also by some-
thing else — some wildness I couldn’t isolate or
define or deny.

I was coming to Macon from a book festival
in Tallahassee. All weekend. I’d kept announc-
ing to my hosts that I’d never spent any time in
North Florida before, but that wasn’t entirely
true: a couple years earlier. I’d spent two days
chasing bigfoots — or the myth of bigfoots —
around the Apalachicola National Forest on a
goofy newspaper assignment. North Florida is
the sort of place where bigfoots seem plausible,
even likely. It is the sort of place you go to and
then forget that you have been there.

Duane and Gregg Allman attended Seabreeze
High School, a couple hundred miles southeast
of Tallahassee in Daytona Beach, a spring break
boomtown situated on what’s sometimes known
as the Fun Coast (an appellation that evokes,
for me, a whole cornucopia of not-fun things,
like date rape and dismemberment). Daytona is
beloved, globally, for its hard-packed beaches
and motorsports. The air is heavy with ozone,
exhaust, Coppertone.

Sometimes I think I can hear Daytona in
Duane’s earhest guitar solos. There’s a sticky,
melting-popsicle quality to those licks. When
the sun rises in North Florida, everything
slumps a little, dribbles: the live oaks saddled
with Spanish moss, the condensation sliding
down a Coors can, all of it bending back toward

earth, ready to be swallowed up — to return,
prodigally. I couldn’t catch a breath there. My
hair curled. After a while, the atmosphere makes
a person feel a little vulnerable. Any masks,
actual or metaphoric, drip right off your face.

Duane was born in Nashville in 1946. Gregg
followed one year and eighteen days later, de-
livered by the same doctor in the same hos-
pital. Their father, Willis Turner Allman, an
Army lieutenant and gunnery sergeant — he
had crawled onto a beach at Normandy — was
murdered the day after Christmas, 1949, when
the boys were three and two years old. He was
shot by a stranger he had met playing pool, had
given a ride to. Details about the night are scant.
Gregg writes about it a bit in his autobiography:
“I don’t have the slightest memory of my father,
nothing.” WiUis’s killer, a dude named Buddy
Green, likely told him to turn off onto some
unmarked dirt road. Something happened, a
botched robbery, everyone split. Green was a
veteran, too — shell-shocked. He plugged three
bullets into Willis’s back that night, then was
caught and lived the rest of his life in prison.
Geraldine “Mama A” Allman raised her two
sons alone.

Young Duane was a quick study at the gui-
tar, which he took up at age thirteen. Gregg
had taught Duane his first chords on an old
Silvertone from Sears — simple things, E, A, B,
the three-chord turnaround — but, as he’s said,
Duane soon passed him as if he were standing
still. Whatever intangible, miraculous thing it is
that separates a very good guitarist from a great
one — Duane had that, in excess. 1 suppose it’s
a kind of vulnerability: a willingness to he ex-
posed down to the marrow, to live as if you were
stuck inside an X-ray machine, with everyone
always seeing all your parts and how you work.
Listening to Duane, you get the sense you’re
receiving everything he had, straight, that he
was uninterested in or incapable of mediating
his presence while playing. That’s Duane.

There is a posed photo of Gregg and Duane
from around this time (they must’ve been high
school freshmen). Save a height difference, they
are nearly identical: blond and blonder. They
started playing together, formed a duo, booked
gigs up and down the strip in Daytona, first as
the Escorts and then as the Allman Joys. They
picked up a few more players, got started on
the chitlin’ circuit. Duane dropped out of high
school and prodded Gregg to do the same. Gregg
wasn’t sure yet — he thought maybe he wanted
to be a dentist. He graduated from Seabreeze,
got accepted to a college in Louisiana. He agreed
to give Duane a year.

The Allmans left Florida in the late 1960s,
first for St. Louis, then Hollywood, where they
signed with Liberty Records, a bum contract
that kept them marooned in California for a
while. Eventually, Duane wiggled out of the
deal and took off for Muscle Shoals. He’d started
messing around with a slide by then, running a
Coricidin cold medicine bottle up and down the
neck of his guitar. Rick Hall, owner of FAME
Studios, said that Duane’s playing around this
time “smelled like it came out of the bottom of
the Tennessee River. ”

Hall hired him as a session guy. One of his
first jobs was backing up Wilson Pickett on a
screaming cover of “Hey Jude.” There’s a photo
of Pickett and Duane working together in the
studio that day. Duane is grinning under a bushy
mustache. He was just twenty-two. I can’t tell
if Pickett is laughing or singing — his head is
thrown way back — but he looks beautiful sitting
next to Duane. The track is worth seeking out;
Duane does some wild soloing during the coda.
The na-na-nas are mercifully low in the mix. I
wonder, sometimes, what Duane thought of the
McCartney lyric “For well you know that it’s a
fool / Who plays it cool” — if it made sense to
him, if it resonated in a big way, as I sometimes
suspect it might’ve. Pickett keeps hollering his
face off, like some exotic bird.

For whatever it’s worth, Eric Clapton named
Duane’s part at the end of “Hey Jude” his favor-
ite guitar solo of all time. Clapton collaborated
with Duane about two years later at a Derek
and the Dominos session in Miami, recording
“Layla,” a track about Clapton’s unrequited love
for George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd. All-
man’s riff is celestial — it floats the whole song.
“When you listen to that album, you notice
that every time Clapton takes a solo and then
Duane takes one and then Clapton comes back
in, it seems like he has a hard time playing, like
he’s had his mind blown,” Duane’s old friend,
the guitarist Jim Shepley, told the journalist Jas
Obrecht in 1982. “I really think Duane messed
his mind up.” Duane doesn’t seem to be affected
by the desperation of Clapton’s love for Boyd,
only by how miraculous it was. (Clapton and
Boyd eventually married.)

Phil Walden, who had managed Otis Redding
up until his death in December of 1967, bought
out Duane’s contract with Hall for $10,000. He
wanted Duane to get a band together to anchor
a new label, Capricorn Records. Walden, then
only twenty-nine years old, had already been
present for a few too many transmutations for
his work as a businessman to feel purely ser-
endipitous. He was engineering things, con-

- 56 -

WINTER 2015

necting loose wires: in 1962, when Walden
was managing a young guitarist named Johnny
Jenkins, he left Jenkins and Otis Redding alone
in the Stax studio for forty-odd minutes. They
recorded a single, “These Arms of Mine,” one
of the sweetest, hungriest implorations ever put
to tape: “These arms of mine / They are yearn-
ing, yearning from wanting you / And if you /
Would let them hold you / Oh, how grateful I
will be,” Redding sings. Jenkins plays a loping
little guitar figure. The 45 eventually sold more
than 800,000 copies.

Walden lined up a distribution deal with
Atlantic while Duane teamed up with a drum-
mer named Jaimoe (ne Johnnie Lee Johnson);
the guitarist Dickey Betts; another drummer.
Butch Trucks ; and the bassist Berry Oakley. He
called up Gregg in Los Angeles, told him to get
back east, fast. And in the spring of 1969, a six-
piece Allman Brothers Band played their first
gig, in Jacksonville, Florida, at a club called the
Jacksonville Armory. Gregg had been home for
just four days. Duane was wearing some kind
of fringed vest onstage that night. There was a
sense that something was happening.

* * *

D riving north from Tallahassee on Inter-
state 75, approaching Perry, Georgia, en
route to Macon, 1 spotted a giant billboard
featuring the word secede, with league of the
SOUTH written below it in slightly smaller let-
tering. What it actually said was #secede, the
League of the South being, apparently, a Web-
sawy operation. After 1 checked into my motor
lodge, I carried a cold can of ginger ale and a nip
of bourbon to the edge of the pool, arranged
myself on a lounge chair, and opened my laptop.

The League of the South s motto is “Survival,
Well-Being, and Independence of the Southern
People.” They are a radical neo-Confederate
organization presently advocating, in 201 5 , for a
second Southern secession, in which a sovereign
South will be governed by a clump of “ Anglo-
Celtic” elites — men and women who “are not
content to sit by and allow their land, liberty,
and culture be destroyed by an alien regime
and ideology.” It’s outlier extremism rooted in
unapologetically racist notions. It is also the
sort of dogma that is often and oddly associated
with Southern rock, the genre that the Allman
Brothers Band inadvertently founded in 1969,
and which was quickly taken up by bands like
Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band,
Molly Hatchet, and Charlie Daniels.

Few mythologies are quite as elaborate and

enduring — as generous and as loathsome — as
the folklore related to the American Southeast.
All that kudzu and Gone with the Wind and
sweet tea and endless anguished visionaries: it
means something to people, casts a certain kind
of spell. But those sorts of fascinations don’t
often develop without something wretched
very close.

Like most musical genres, Southern rock itself
is strange to define — it is, at its simplest, a blues-
based, r&b-influenced, heavily guitar-driven
strain of rock music. But the related iconography
is easy, familiar: Confederate flag, pickup truck,
long, stringy hair, distaste for outsiders. What
is particularly confounding about these associa-
tions — and they are so odious — is that Southern
rock was built on interracial collaborations, and
I don’t just mean in the expansive sense, in
the way that all American popular music was
in fact seeded by the blues, but in the actual
sense, in that one of the founding members of
the Allman Brothers, Jaimoe, is black. Duane
and Gregg grew up listening to soul and r&b and
blues records; Gregg has talked about pedaling
his bicycle across the tracks — literally — to buy
two-dollar LPs from a convenience store in a
black neighborhood, toting home albums by
B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, Sonny
Boy Williamson.

The band relocated to Macon in the spring
of 1969. Walden, a Georgia native, wanted to
establish Capricorn there and asked the band to
come up from Florida. Since graduating from
Mercer University in 1962, Walden had been
booking or managing an impressive roster of r&b
performers: Clarence Carter, Arthur Conley,
A1 Green, Percy Sledge, Jenkins, Redding. He
had grown up in rural Georgia, and was taken,
at an early age, with black musicians, whom he
routinely booked for white parties. Capricorn
was built on the notion of symbiosis, dissolving
the membranes between genres, races, histories.
“1 think 1 quickly earned this reputation as this
little white boy who loves black music, ” Walden
later told his niece, Jessica. “1 was just infatu-
ated by it. I didn’t listen to anything else. I sort
of missed that whole Presley thing. To me, the
greatest rock & roll singer of all time, and the
one who still possesses the truest, purest rock &
roll voice is Little Richard. That is where rock &
roll is from. The white performers tapped into
what marvelously talented black performers
had created.”

Otis Redding’s sudden death via plane crash
devastated Walden, knocked him out for a while.
But now, working with Jerry Wexler, Frank
Fenter, and his brother Alan, Walden was help-

ing Capricorn Records find its legs, first as a
series in conjunction with Atlantic and ATCO,
and then as its own boutique enterprise. Cap-
ricorn would soon become synonymous with
Southern rock — with the swampy, rollicking
sound built in Macon.

The Allman Brothers Band moved into an
apartment at 309 College Street, known more
colloquially as the Hippie Crash Pad. The living
room was lined with end-to-end mattresses.
There was a Coke machine stocked with Pabst
Blue Ribbon. The band members were taking
all their meals at H&H Soul Food — Mama Lou-
ise Hudson, the chef and proprietor, was an
early and inadvertent patron, feeding them on
credit — and chasing each repast with fistfuls of
psychedelic mushrooms.

Macon itself wasn’t sure what to make of all
these goings-on. An interracial band of longharrs
in the Deep South in the late 1960s — it was
heavy. It had only been about thirteen months
since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated
in Memphis. Thirty-three school districts in
Mississippi still hadn’t been desegregated. A
gang of penurious bohemians palling around
with a black man attracted notice, made people
nervous. Nowadays, Sly and the Family Stone
receives (and deserves) credit for being the first
major integrated American rock band (and they
were also multi-gender), but the Allman Broth-
ers Band was right behind them. Gregg Allman
spent his free time playing craps in the back of
a black barbershop. They were, to borrow the
parlance of the day, liberated.

Throughout their tenure, the Allmans re-
mained loyal to the South, insisted upon it. The
first time they played up north was in 1969, at
a club called the Boston Tea Party. They were
opening for the Velvet Underground for two
nights, two sold-out crowds. It seems like an
incongruous pairing, and by all accounts it
was — this would’ve been “Pale Blue Eyes,”
“Candy Says”-era Velvets, Lou Reed singing
grim little couplets in his most subdued voice,
with the kind of icy disaffection that comes so
effortlessly to New Workers (and especially to
Lou Reed). Imagine, for a second, that sound
juxtaposed with Gregg’s warm, mischievous
take on “One Way Out,” the Sonny Boy Wil-
liamson wailer the band had taken to covering.
It’s a cagey song, but the live version the band
recorded a couple years later — for 1972’s Eat a
Peach — is one of the least cynical performances
of anything, ever. And if they played it like that?

The band released its self-titled debut in late
1969. The album didn’t sell very well — around
33,000 copies. Butch Trucks later told the writer

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- 57 -

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WITH POST MORTEM BAR. HIGH ON A MOUNTAIN

Alan Paul that they didn’t care much about
sales, and especially didn’t care about chang-
ing, regardless of blowback from the industry.
“They thought a bunch of Southern guys just
standing there playing extended musical Jams
was absurd,” Trucks told Paul. “They wanted
Gregg out from behind the organ, jumping
around with a salami in his pants.”

The interior gatefold cover of The Allman
Brothers Band features a grainy photograph of
the band, naked, seated in a shaded woodland
creek. Actually, Butch Trucks is standing up. He
is wearing an exceptionally large hat. Berry Oak-
ley’s coiffure is blocking his business, barely.

Gregg didn’t consider himself much of a
singer, or not at first. I’ve come to find his per-
formance on “Whipping Post” miraculous. It’s
not a self-pitying song, but it is resigned: “My
friends tell me / That I’ve been such a fool / I
have to stand by and take it, baby / All for lov-
ing you, ” he sings. It’s a song specifically about
taking it — receiving the punch, absorbing all
the blows you deserve and a whole bunch you
probably don’t — but it is also about reckoning
with the fallout of those wounds, with accepting
how they linger. Sometimes, the song suggests,
we are all wound. It becomes hard, in those mo-
ments, to find an unmangled part of yourself.
That gruff, sprained-sounding baritone. It’s
as if he were coerced into admitting his own
sadness, like that moment a person sorta snaps,
hollers: “ Yes, I am upset." He wrote the lyrics by
rubbing burnt matches onto an ironing board
cover in the middle of the night. “Good Lord,
I feel like I’m dying.”

If you compare those vocals to the way he
sings on, say, “Melissa,” from Eat a Peach, you
can hear how he eventually learned to control
and very nearly defang his voice. Somehow,
between 1969 and 1972, he alleviated himself
of something. Which is remarkable, considering
that, by then, Gregg had lost both his brother
and his father in horrifying, gruesome incidents.
I like to think it was Duane who’d goaded him
into singing the other way, yielding that strange
fraternal muscle, the power brothers have over
each other. Duane had made him give something
up that he hadn’t wanted to, and now Gregg was
taking it back, closing the vault. That earlier
voice, it was for Duane alone.

B y 1970, the Allmans had figured out
they worked best as a live act: the music
squirmed, needed air and room to wander.
That year, the band released a follow-up LP,

- 58 -

WINTER 2015

Idlewild South, and scheduled a 300-something-
date tour. In a review of the album for Rolling
Stone, the rock critic Ed Leimbacher said the
Allmans were playing “briefer, tighter, less
‘heavy’ numbers this time around,” and com-
pared them, several times, to Santana.

Idlewild South is, in its way, a more con-
trolled record than their debut, but there is
still a specific rowdiness to it, an elasticity. It
is extraordinarily loose-limbed. To this day,
“Midnight Rider,” a song Gregg cowrote with
Kim Payne, one of the band’s roadies, feels like a
kind of apotheosis of Southern rock — if not its
precise genesis — in both spirit and form. All the
elements are there, stacked up: Duane’s balmy,
supple guitars, that insistent groove, those wary,
get-me-out-of-here lyrics. The Allmans were
a band preoccupied by motion. “The road goes
on forever,” Gregg sings. “But I’m not gonna
let ’em catch me, no.” Legend has it that Gregg
and Payne broke into Capricorn Studios in the
middle of the night to record a demo of the
song. It’s like they had to grab it before it ran off.

* * *

M otion sustained and also undid the
Allman Brothers Band. In 1971, when
Duane was twenty-four years old, he
crashed his Harley-Davidson Sportster while
trying to avoid a flatbed lumber truck at the
intersection of Hillcrest Avenue and Bartlett
Street in Macon. He’d just left Linwood-Bryant
Hospital in Buffalo, a rehab facility where he’d
been attempting — alongside Berry Oakley and
two of the band’s roadies, Payne and Red Dog
Campbell — to kick a fairly robust heroin habit.
According to Alan Paul, Gregg was scheduled
to check in, too, but split at the last minute to
white-knuckle it on his own.

Duane was alive when they put him in an
ambulance but died a few hours later, in surgery.
The Allman Brothers Band played at the funeral,
with Duane’s guitar propped up where he used
to stand. His friends placed talismans in the cas-
ket, provisions for the other side: a silver dollar,
a throwing knife, two Joints, a lighter, and his
favorite ring, a silver snake that coiled around his
finger and had two chunks of turquoise for eyes.
He’s buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon.
The band used to hang out there, writing songs,
getting stoned. When I visited the grave, just
before dusk, it was cool, misty, verdant. There’s
a fence up around it now, paid for by fans who
grew concerned about the ongoing desecration
of the site. Previously, bits of the tombstone
had been stolen, defaced. According to local

lore, people had often been caught engaging in
sexual congress there. It’s also been said that a
couple of particularly frenzied acolytes once dug
a tunnel, trying to snatch the body.

There is a famous picture of Duane, taken
earlier in 1971, performing at the Fillmore East.
The band was playing the songs that would
eventually comprise their breakthrough re-
cord, At Fillmore East, which had only been
out for a little more than three months when
Duane died (Rolling Stone called it “the finest
live rock performance ever committed to vinyl”).
He is wearing a long-sleeved henley shirt in an
oceanic blue. The bottom button appears to be
missing, revealing a triangle of rosy chest-flesh.
His hair — shoulder-length, center-parted, and
strawberry blond — is limp with sweat, clinging
to his forehead like a pair of wet jeans. His eyes
are squeezed shut and his mouth is ajar, gaped.
His hands are on his guitar.

It is not the most flattering photograph, to
be frank, although he made that face a lot, so
it is also not anomalous. Something about his
comportment here sort of resembles a catfish,
glugging away at the bottom of a brackish pond.
But there is another thing communicated in his
expression, in the way his mouth is hanging
open, as if it were unhinged at the jaw. It’s the
kind of look you sometimes see on the faces of
people undergoing a faith healing. It’s as if major
things were coming in and going out.

* * *

44 ”•1 Tou get real wicked after somebody
Y dies, and you get pissed off,” Gregg
A writes in his autobiography, My Cross
to Bear, He reflects gently on the process of heal-
ing, of reorienting yourself around an absence :
“It takes some time, and probably a few glasses
of spirits.”

Interestingly, Duane’s death doesn’t take
up too much space in Gregg’s book, which was
published to acclaim in 2012. Gregg recognizes
that grief changes shape, but it doesn’t leave
you, or not really. There isn’t all that much to
say about it after a while. “Not that I got over
it — I still ain’t gotten over it,” he writes. “I
don’ t know what getting over it means , really. ”

By all accounts. Berry Oakley changed after
Duane’s accident. “The truth is that Berry Oak-
ley’s life ended when my brother’s life did. Never
have I seen a man collapse like that,” Gregg
writes. Oakley started drinking like someone
who did not much care for being alive: a case
of beer every morning, early. A bottle of Jack
Daniel’s by mid-aftemoon. He was often too

fucked up to play bass. A year after Duane’s
death, Oakley drove his own motorcycle into the
side of a bus three blocks away from the crash
site. Some people think he did it on purpose. He
was wasted. He refused to get into an ambulance.
He went back to the house and sat around and
had a brain hemorrhage and died.

The band released Fata Peach, its third studio
record, in the winter of 1972. It was gold by the
time it shipped and debuted on the Billboard Top
10. Dickey Betts capably plays what would have
been Duane’s parts. The album opens with one
of my favorite Allman Brothers songs, “Ain’t
Wastin’ Time No More,” which Gregg wrote
on a one-hundred-ten-year-old Steinway piano,
and which features this lovely little vocal move
on the chorus, where Gregg sings “Time goes
by like hurricanes / And faster things, ” only he
makes the words rhyme, lets them extend and
dissipate, lets them disappear elegantly, like
smoke rings in the night. It barely happens,
but you notice it.

Oakley, who was alive for most of the re-
cording, was not alive for the accolades, or the
influx of cash. Phil Walden started piloting a
white 1965 Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce around
Macon. Capricorn was taking off. Soon they’d
be releasing records by Marshall Tucker, James
Montgomery, Elvin Bishop, Bobby Whitlock.
The band toured and toured. The Allmans re-
leased a follow-up. Brothers and Sisters, in the
summer of 1973. The record made it to No. 1
on the pop chart, due in part to the success of
“Ramblin’ Man,” a major-key paean to eschew-
ing responsibility (it was written by Betts, and
inspired by the Hank Williams jam of the same
name).

“Ramblin’ Man” enjoyed a long and some-
what curious stint as an AM radio hit, a small
coup for a rock band in the early 1970s. It’s a
buoyant, carefree song, the kind of thing that
sounds good at a cookout while you are squirt-
ing mustard onto a hot dog, but terrible later
on, in your bedroom. The band started jetting
around on a customized Boeing 720B — the same
plane commandeered by Led Zeppelin and the
Stones — and doing spectacular amounts of
drugs. (They were briefly joined on that tour
by an adolescent Rolling Stone reporter named
Cameron Crowe, who later mined their road
shenanigans for both a magazine story and his
film Almost Famous)

They made a bunch of shitty records after
that. Gregg started dating Cher (“I’m sorry, but
she’s not a very good singer,” he later wrote
of the union). There were a lot of mediocre
side projects. By the late 1970s, the band was

OxfordAmerican.org

■ 59 -

done. Animosity was high; people were broke,
paranoid. Walden himself was becoming an
increasingly contentious figure in the manner
of all great rock managers and impresarios,
like anyone who ends up with a mercenary
stake in the production and dissemination of
an art that is not entirely his own. His legacy
is still regarded with equal parts wariness and
reverence (he died, in 2006, of cancer). He
is often credited, fairly or not, with helping
Jimmy Carter get elected president in 1976,
throwing the full Southern rock gentry behind
Carters bid, hosting benefits, concerts, events.
Eventually, it was revealed that Phil Walden
owed a lot of people a lot of money. Capricorn
went bankrupt.

I n 2014, the old Capricorn Records build-
ing was decreed uninhabitable by the city
of Macon, although it somehow avoided
timely demolition. The whole block has re-
cently been purchased and the community
apparently has designs on rehabilitation, on
turning the space into a new set of lofts or of-
fices. Otis Redding set up business there in

the late 1960s — you can see the exterior of
the building in the video for “Tramp,” the one
where he’s wearing that terrific green suit and
counting cash on the street. For now, the build-
ing’s concealed behind a temporary black wall.
From afar, the barrier looks like one of those
opaque bands blocking out sex organs on the
covers of nudie magazines. If you stand close
enough and sort of jump up and down in front
of it — or, emboldened, perhaps you attempt to
scale it, maybe getting yourself close enough to
the top to snap a cell phone photo, one eye on
the sheriff s car idling across the street — you can
still make out where the old letters hung, the
ones that spelled out capricorn. After my visit,
1 drove to a bar downtown, ordered a bourbon
and soda, and listened, no joke, to “The Night
They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the house
stereo. I thought about what had been made
there, in Macon.

I still don’t know how to write about this
without sounding hysterical, but there’s some-
thing in those early records that seems to presage
tragedy. I keep listening for it now, trying to
parse it out, name it: certain things run so hot
that dissolution of a sort seems inevitable. All
the great loves work that way. It’s so present in

Duane’s guitar playing — a flood, like the valves
were too open, like too much of him was getting
in. And his bandmates, his little brother: how
do you lose like that and keep going? And not
only keep going, but thrive, find a way to make
songs that are joyful, exultant?

It’s hard, these days, in Macon, to feel the
sense of possibility that must have been present
there in the late 1960s — a belief that the future
might transcend the past, that, as Lou Reed sang,
“what comes is better than what came before.”
The Allmans found it, and held it, at least for
a short while.

The band eventually got back together, in the
eighties. In the 1990s, they released a string of
fair-to-unremarkable albums. They played some
shows that were considered epic — perfect — and
only officially retired from the road in late 2014.
The jam-band preoccupation of the early 1990s
had helped them commercially. Jfeung people
suddenly had stamina for noodling. Personally,
I recall some of those shows feeling downright
transcendent. They’d put off the studio years
before that, although they were never really a
studio band to begin with. Their music lived in
the air, in that Florida-Georgia haze. You had to
feel it on your skin.

t:

CQ

&

Oh

Aaron Douglas & Arna Bontemps: PARTNERS IN ACTIVISM

The AMoA and Arna Bontemps African American Museum have partnered to dispiay this
exhibition highiighting artist Aaron Douglas and author Arna Bontemps. Both men were
professors at Fisk University in Nashville and were involved in the Harlem Renaissance.
Paintings and Illustrations by Douglas will be paired with writings by Bontemps to create
a unique exhibition of work by two influential African American artists and educators.

Harmonic Fascination: THE ART OF MAX PAPART

Max Popart, born in France in 1911, was a diverse artist with a clear vision.

After abandoning his classical artistic education, he adopted a more abstract,
surrealist style. After multiple visits to the U.S., he moved to New Orleans in 1979,
and drew influence from his new location. His prints and paintings are filled with color
and symbolism. This exhibition will look into Popart's artistic development, from his
classical drawing through his paintings, prints, and his exploration of a few other mediums.

On Ancient Wings: THE SANDHILL CRANES OF NORTH AMERICA

This exhibition uses traditional film photography by presenting 38 color photographs
from the award-winning book by internationally known conservation photographer
Michael Forsberg. Whooping cranes, the species found in Louisiana, were added to
the endangered species list in 1967. This led to the development of an experimental
population at the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area in 2011. On Ancient Wings
serves to highlight the cranes as well as the work to preserve this species in Louisiana
and other locations throughout the country. Nature is a prominent theme in
Southern art and photography, as well as in Alexandria Museum of Art's collection.

MUSEUM

i I ART

933 Second Street

Downtown Alexandria, Louisiana
(318) 443-3458 • themuseum.org

oo

All AMoA exhibitions are supported by GAEDA, a cooperative effort funded by the Greater Aiexandria Economic Deveiopment Authority.

- 60 -

WiNTER 2015

HISTORIC

DYESS

COLONY

JOHNNY CASH
BOYHOOD HOME

<ess, Arkansas

MWANSAS STAH UNIVERSITY

Heritage Site

DyessCashJiState. edu

Check out these other stones hi our collection

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THE CROOKED ROAD’S

MOUNTAINS

OF MUSIC

HOMECOMING

JUNE 10-18, 2016

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T here is a place where some
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musical roots still thrive.
Nestled in the scenic mountains
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known as The Crooked Road: Virginia's
Heritage Music Trail.

Heritage music forms — old time,
bluegrass, gospel, and many others
— are still a part of the everyday
fabric of life here. Like precious
heirlooms, these forms have been
lovingly handed down through
generations, and kept vibrant in
communities that understand the
value and authenticity of that music
and culture. The Crooked Road's
330 miles connect the home places of
some of the most beloved figures in
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for its beautiful landscape, storied
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event has become one of the best
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For nine magical days, June 10-18,
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feast of traditional music and cultural
experiences in welcoming communities
throughout Southwest Virginia during
the second annual Mountains of Music
Homecoming. Visitors can enjoy
Crooked Road marquee concerts in
over 20 communities, and hundreds of

experiences that showcase the region's
rich culture and outdoor adventures in
over 50 communities.

"The people who most enjoyed the
first Mountains of Music Homecoming
were looking to coimect with a unique
culture," said Crooked Road executive
director Jack Hinshelwood. "It's one
thing to hear an incredible concert of
traditional music, but couple that with
a day enjoying distinctive cultural
experiences, breathtaking scenery, local
flavors of dining and shopping, and you
have a full Homecoming experience."

The intimate marquee concerts
feature the region's finest tradition
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many others. Concerts for 2016 include
a landmark gathering of Southwest
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Lonesome River Band's Sammy Shelor
on banjo.

"Visitors love the sense of discovery
here, whether it's discovering what's
aroimd the next bend of The Crooked
Road, or discovering a local fiddler
that can 'fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-
potato vine,' to quote poet Stephen
Vincent Benet," said Hinshelwood.

The cultural experiences will again
be a major component of the 2016
Homecoming and will build on 2015
experiences such as the community
meals, guitar-making demonstrations,
wine and beer tastings, canoe
floats, jam sessions, and many more
entertaining offerings.

The 2016 Mountains of Music
Homecoming is a chance to not just visit
a unique place and culture, but to become
part of it. Tor more information visit www.
mtnsofmusic.com.

- 64 -

WINTER 2015

Photograph of Jonathan Athon backstage at the Jinx, by Geoff L. Johnson, geoffsphotos.com

— • SCENES —

In Days of Woe

BY

BILL DAWERS

L ast winter, the metal band Black Tusk
went on a six- week tour of Europe, where
they’ve established a strong following
over the past decade. As most any band would
today, they shared a candid visual diary on so-
cial media. But the trio’s followers on Facebook
and Instagram (there are more than 54,000 of
them) weren’t just seeing the expected perfor-
mance photos, landscape shots, party pics, and
show promos. Black Tusk had a mission abroad,
which they christened #ripathon.

In one photo, guitarist Andrew Fidler stands
on the deck of a ship crossing the Enghsh Chan-
nel, his face obscured by his long hair, his right
arm extended over the water, a bottle barely
visible in his hand. #ripathon. In another, he

crouches on a stone barrier beside the River
Clyde in Glasgow, while drummer James May
holds a small purple flower above him. Similar
images were shared from quiet comers across
the continent — along the Elbe and the Danube,
beside a canal in Amsterdam, a creek in London,
on the Latvian shore of the Baltic Sea, in the
Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic.

By the time Black Tusk returned home to
Savannah, Georgia, in March, their load was a
little lighter: they’d left ashes of their bassist,
Athon, in every place they’d gone.

O n the evening of November 7, 2014, Jona-
than Athon and his girlfriend, Emily, were
heading south on Price Street in Savannah’s
Historic District when an eighty-five-year-old
driver in an SUV ran a STOP sign, intercepting
Athon ’s Harley-Davidson. The two were wear-
ing helmets, and Emily eventually recovered,
but Athon — everyone called him by his last
name — suffered irreparable brain damage and
was removed from life support two days later.
He was thirty-two. His band had Just finished
recording their fifth album, and they were ex-
cited about an upcoming European tour with
Black Label Society.

The news of Athon’s sudden passing spread
rapidly around the world. The metal press,
major music publications, and even mainstream
news media picked it up. Friends and musi-

cians who had known Athon posted tributes
on social media.

“He had an insatiable appetite to fix things,
an uncompromising honesty, and an enviable
ambition to learn new skills,” wrote John Dyer
Baizley of Baroness, another band forged in
the Savannah metal scene. “He was a unique
person to say the least, hardworking till the
end, and with a lust for life that sometimes left
us aU spinning. ”

Susanne Guest Warnekros, the owner of the
Jinx, the Savannah bar that nurtured Black Tusk
and other metal acts, wrote: “He wasn’t just
a badass when he was onstage, he was also a
badass at manufacturing and fixing every single
thing this bar ever needed, with no complaints
and often did these things not because he was
asked to, but because he noticed it needed to
be done. There’s not one inch of this bar that
you can put your eyes on that he hasn’t had a
part in making. ”

When Black Tusk formed in 2005, Athon
was a punk guitarist with no experience on bass.
“Since it was Athon, he taught himself how to
play bass in fucking a month, ” James May told
me. “He taught himself how to do everything,
man. In a very short period of time, and got
good at it. He was just that type of person.”

Athon was known around town as a big-
hearted doer — a generous carpenter and
handyman who was always willing to help

OxfordAmerican.org

■ S5 -

his friends. His absence has been deeply felt.
My first conversations with him were at a hunt-
ing lodge in the woods along a marsh south
of Savannah. Owned by an alligator trapper
whose daughter is married to a musician, the
property was regularly used for casual potlucks
and cookouts. Athon would generally man the
barbecue, which he had made out of an oil drum.
With his long red beard and constant smile,
Athon the grill master was the flip side of the
onstage musician, who wielded his bass like a
medieval mace.

Some of us in the city’s small music com-
munity wondered if the metal scene, let alone
the band, would survive without Athon, who
seemed to be at the center of so many crucial
projects — musical, construction, and otherwise.
But less than a month after the wreck, Black
Tusk announced that they would honor their
commitment to the European tour that had been
scheduled before Athon’s death. Corey Barhorst,
the former bass player for Kylesa, one of the first
bands to be identified with Savannah metal,
would go in his place.

Within the band, there was never a question
about whether Black Tusk would keep on. “The
band at this point is bigger than the three of us,”

Andrew told me in July. We were hanging out
with Corey and James in front of the auto repair
business on Montgomery Street where they
practice after hours. “The band is its own fuck-
ing entity,” Andrew added. “It’s Black Tusk.”
#ripathon continued throughout the year
as the band, with Barhorst now a permanent
member, toured extensively across the United
States and again in Europe. Jonathan Athon’s
remains were deposited in the Mississippi Riv-
er in Memphis, the Ohio in Cincinnati, Lake
Pontchartrain, and Buckingham Fountain in
Chicago’s Grant Park. Relapse Records, which
first signed Black Tusk in 2009, has extended
their contract, and a new album — the last record-
ings on which Athon appears — is scheduled for
release in early 2016.

Corey said, “Athon would have been pissed
off to see people moping around.”

A port city that has seen many waves of immi-
gration over the years. Savannah has always
been a creative enclave. I’ve been covering music
here for fifteen years. Today, it’s common to see
metalheads at country shows or punks support-
ing hip-hop, and Athon seemed to know every-
one. A week after the wreck, friends and family

gathered in Franklin Square to share memories
and to grieve. There was a makeshift memorial
on one of the benches, while Ghost Town Tat-
too across the street continued its fund-raiser in
Athon’s honor. The shop eventually completed
eighty-nine memorial tattoos, with the proceeds
going to medical expenses for Athon’s girlfriend
and for two of his friends: the musicians Jason
Statts, who was paralyzed in a random street
shooting in 2008, and Keith Kozel, who is bat-
tling a degenerative kidney disease.

Afterward, some of Athon’s closer friends
convened for a sad night a few blocks away at
the Jinx. Many of them had been key players in
the Savannah metal scene from the beginning,
when it grew out of underground punk of the
eighties and nineties. “Back then in Savannah,
things were so under the radar, ” Phillip Cope
later told me. “You could get away with a lot
without even being noticed.” When Cope’s
band, Kylesa, and Baroness gained national
attention under the label “sludge metal,” Sa-
vannah earned a reputation as one of the genre’s
hubs. But most of the artists assembled under
that banner resisted definition, including Black
Tusk. “It was just punks getting into heavier
stuff,” Cope said. Still, as the local bands were
embraced by metal fans around the world, their
relentless touring left a void at home. “By the
time people outside Savannah discovered
the scene in Savannah, the scene was already
over. ” In one of Black Tusk’s best-known songs,
“Truth Untold,” from their 2013 album Tend
No Wounds, Athon sang: “The arrival of times
unworthy behold the future in days of woe
shadows shall rise.”

There are still metal bands in Savannah,
but lately the scene has been eclipsed by other
genres: old-school punk, Americana, and vari-
ous stripes of indie rock. In 2013, Cope and
his Kylesa bandmates Laura Pleasants and Carl
McGinley II founded Retro Futurist Records,
which has released music by several newer bands
like the garage rock duo Wet Socks, the punk act
Crazy Bag Lady, and the psych rock band Niche.
There is some fast music there, and some heavy
music, too, but none of those are metal acts.

“It’s natural for things to evolve and change,”
Cope told me. “Moving on is just kind of our
thing.”

Baroness is now based in Philadelphia and
rarely books gigs in Savannah. Black Tusk played
only two hometown shows in 2015, but An-
drew, James, and Corey still routinely come out
to the Jinx, and Athon never seems far away.
A painted portrait of him and his dog, Cutter,
hangs above the bar’s front door. "I

n OGDEN MUSEUM

OF SOUTHERN ART

SEE THE SOUTH. HEAR THE SOUTH. SHOP THE SOUTH.

Wednesday through Monday 10am-5pm
Thursdays with live music at Ogden After Hours 6pm-8pm

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Michael Meads, Drunken Punchinellos in Love,
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- 66 -

WINTER 2015

o

Country Notes
by Country Folks

BY

REGINA N. BRADLEY

I ’m from Albany, Georgia. We’re in the south-
west corner of the state. About a three-and-
a-half-hour ride south from Atlanta. Ninety
miles north of Tallahassee. Wedged between
leaning cornstalks, flat farmlands, and planta-
tions. WE.B. Du Bois came down for a visit once.
Seemingly unimpressed, he in his Northeast
urban snooty candor declared black Albanians
“sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured
and simple, talkative to a degree, and ... far
more silent and brooding.” When the July sun, a
silent terror in its own right, tried to beat down
on him, Du Bois reported it to be “a sort of dull,
determined heat that seems quite independent
of the sun.” For the record, southwest Georgia
heat whoops ass. It’s dense and wet and sticks
to skin like melted glue.

After Du Bois’s visit in those early years
of the nineteen hundreds, Albany black folks
pushed forward in their own unbothered way.
Like many rural places across the South, a callus
of racial tension and segregation hardened, but
eventually black folks buzzed with keywords
like “protest,” “desegregation,” and “Martin
Luther ‘the’ King Jr.” Local leaders like W G.
Anderson, Slater King, and Marion S. Page
encouraged blacks to fight for their civil rights,
and in the early 1960s Albany’s freedom move-
ment rose on a national scale. Student Nonvio-
lent Goordinating Committee representatives
traveled to Albany to set up voter registration
drives. Students who attended the historically
black Albany State College (now University)
participated in, and were jailed for participating
in, sit-ins and marches. Albany’s young folks
used their own talents to protest, including
Bernice Johnson Reagon and Rutha Mae Har-
ris, who, along with SNCC representatives
Charles Neblett and Cordell Reagon, formed
the Freedom Singers. When they were arrested
in Albany, the group “sang across the cells,
trying to keep our spirits up,” Harris once told

my Sunday school class during a Black History
Month program.

White folks didn’t like any of it, and they
threatened physical and economic violence.
“They would Are anybody they found out was
part of the movement, ” my grandparents told
me. “We wanted change but had to take care of
our families and make money. ” Black folks had
to keep the momentum going behind the scenes.

Albany State, under threat of losing fund-
ing, expelled students who protested. Morale
started slipping, so movement leaders called in
Martin Luther King Jr. , who came to Albany in
1961, marched, preached, and was jailed. Al-
though King and his people refused to post bail,
someone anonymously paid for it and they were
released. According to folks whispering around
town, then-police chief Laurie Pritchett had set

up King’s bail to be paid, a tactic he used to lower
protesters’ morale and undermine movement
efforts. Pritchett proved a formidable foe, jail-
ing protesters in Albany and across southwest
Georgia, a region as hostile to black freedom
as any. Perhaps King got humbled a bit by the
realization that rural Southern black folks’ blues
and struggles weren’t like his native Atlanta. His
failure to rectify Albany’s race relations in a fell
swoop forced King to understand that there was
no such thing as a successful cookie-cutter move-
ment for redeeming black folks’ civil rights.

Like that July sun that beat down on Du Bois’s
back, Albany continued to protest, a slow burn
independent of the national movement. But
momentum and enthusiasm died down after
1964, until all that was left were murmurs
during Black History Month programs, family

© Radcliffe Bailey. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

OxfordAmerican.org

- 67 -

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Upcoming Events!

Nov 21 - Jan 6

89th Annual Festival of Lights

December 5th

Christmas Festival Parade

Dec 9, 11, 12,16,18,19

Christmas Tour of Flomes

February 6th

Krewe of Dionysus Mardi Gras Parade

March 19th

Bloomin' on the Bricks

April 15-16th

Jazz and R&B Festival

April 16-17th

Melrose Arts & Crafts Festival

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reunions, and Sunday church services. For a
long time, Albany’s status as a civil rights battle-
ground remained deeply attached to local lore.

I grew up in post-civil rights Albany. I was a
member of the generation of black children
obligated to participate in pageants and essay
contests dedicated to preserving the legacy of
the folks who fought for the rights 1 enjoyed
daily. Some of the former student protesters
were teachers at my high school, like the Rev-
erend Dr. Janie Rambeau, who marched and
was expelled from Albany State.

1 lived with my grandparents on the south
side of Dougherty County on Hardup Road.
There were plantations on either side of our
house. Rows of corn and melons flanked our
back yard — as a little girl I wondered if the mel-
ons were green balloons waiting to be popped.
Flying cockroaches would hang from the tips of
low-hanging tree branches, and kamikaze dove
into your face if you walked underneath them.
Lime perfumed the air early in the morning and
late at night. The quiet on Hardup Road was
thick and stuffed my ears. A random mooing
cow or car kickback was welcome. There was
very little to do but watch satellite television,
listen to music, and walk the road. We literally
lived in “the field.”

Music kept me sane. The blues was for Satur-
day morning cleanups with Paw Paw and Nana
Boo before going to Albany State football games
at Hugh Mills Stadium. Gospel Cavalcade was
for Sunday rides to church. But hip-hop was
mine, for all occasions.

My bedroom was always piled with home-
made mixtapes I pulled from the radio. My first
mixtape was special because it marked my move
in 1998 from northern Virginia to the Dirty
South — 1 still remember how LL Cool J’s verse
on the remix of Montell Jordan’s “Let’s Ride”
abruptly shifted into Three 6 Mafia’s “Tear Da
Club Up ’97. ” Mixtapes were painstaking work:
listening to the radio for hours to songs 1 didn’t
like, finally hearing the song I’d been waiting
for, starting at the right place on the tape, and
stopping the recording before commercials or
another song came on.

Some songs, like Atlanta-based Goodie
Mob’s “Black Ice,” made it on every mixtape I
ripped. Big Gipp’s opening lines — “Now you
know and I know / 1 done bumped every hole
in the wall, y’all” — could be read as a double
entendre for being knocked around by life and
also getting high. This song invoked my uncer-
tainty about school and the risks of moving
forward without a clear vision of what I was

doing, anxieties that conflicted with advice
from my grandparents, who encouraged me to
go on faith, perched on the sacrificial shoulders
of black folks before me.

Mixtapes were currency at Albany-area high
schools, bartered across cafeteria tables, under
school desks, through slits of car windows,
and out of trunks. They featured Albany and
surrounding- area hip-hop acts like Field Mob,
Suthern Klick, THER.I.P.Y, Ness Lee, Ole-E,
D.R.U., and Big Nod, who spun stories of grow-
ing up in the rural South. Southern hip-hop
made room for a new generation of young black
folks to speak their truths.

There’s a distinction between urban and rural
in Southern hip-hop, and in Georgia this dif-
ference was especially prominent during the
mid- to late 1990s. Atlanta rappers, especially
OutKast, were at the time bearing a huge burden
of outside criticism — the ideas from New York
and California that Southerners were incapable
of producing legitimate hip-hop music and cul-
ture. Atlanta was eventually able to successfully
garner attention as a viable hip-hop hub and,
through its brandishing, came to represent all
of Georgia. Georgian rappers who hailed from
rural hometowns, and also wanted legitimacy,
switched their allegiances from the country to
the more visible Atlanta in order to receive a
shot at being commercially successful.

Field Mob, though, represented “the ’Bany.”
While urban hip-hop ushered in an era of
“bling” and hyper-materialism, the Albany-
based duo trademarked their country-ness. To-
gether, Shawn “Shawn Jay” Johnson and Darion
“Smoke” Crawford refused to shy away from
their country upbringing and poverty. Joining
forces after battling at Monroe Comprehensive
High School, Field Mob used their experiences
of growing up poor and black to make country
a serious Southern hip-hop trope, creating a
brand of music that was especially janky and
uncouth. Field Mob looked to the future, refus-
ing to romanticize the post-civil rights South
as the “mountaintop” fought for during the
sixties. They recognized how slow living and
slavery’s rolling and residual effects still domi-
nated lesser-developed parts of the rural South.
Country black folks’ experiences didn’t easily
situate within the urban version of hip-hop.
“We [wanted] to be mascots for the country,”
Shawn Jay once said in a radio interview.

FieldMob’s 2000 debut, 613: Ashy to Classy,
shone Albany in a more contemporary light, as a
city struggling with socioeconomic troubles not
ameliorated by the civil rights movement. Their
first single, “Project Dreamz,” became poor

- 68 -

WINTER 2015

and rural black folks’ anthem — the song was in
constant rotation on the local hip-hop stations,
96.3 WJIZ and the now-defunct HOT106.1.
Composed of plucky guitar strings, percussion,
and scratching synthesizers, with well-placed
church hollers throughout the chorus, “Project
Dreamz” presented a solemn view of growing
up poor in rural Georgia. Across radio waves and
school hallways people sung the song’s hook: “If
you ever heen broke put your hands up.” The
punch lines were catchy and painful, conjuring
images of drug abuse, soul food, and poverty
(“have you ever hathed with soap the size of
a Cert?”) that resonated with people outside
of Georgia’s urban center. You could feel the
power in these lines, listening as Smoke’s high
and nasal voice complemented the octave dips
in Shawn Jay’s gravelly delivery.

Field Mob was also aware of Albany’s status
as a “ghost town” of the civil rights imagination,
and their second album, From tba Roota to the
Toota, recalls Albany’s racial tensions and history.
“It’s Hell, ” a song featuring fellow Albany rapper
Ole-E, references slavery and slave masters. The
use of vibrato in scripture, call-and-response,
and the chorus in “AU I BCnow” pulls from the
backwoods Baptist sermonic tradition of re-
demption and “come as you are” rhetoric. The
accompanying music video best illustrates it:
rapper GeeLo, in traditional pastoral robes, raps
from the pulpit while church members, wear-
ing clothes ranging from “Sunday best” suits
and dresses to street clothes (baggy jeans, short
skirts, and polo shirts) wave hands in praise. But
“Don’t Want No Problems” takes modern racial
tension head on:

I’m from the home of racist rednecks and
Confederate flags

You could strand them hussies, politicians,
and drags

Cotton pickin ’, slave tradin ’, and nigga
lynchin ’

Lead to more oppression, me Cricket caught
trigger pinchin '

Shawn Jay’s flow is then interrupted by a cop’s
Doppler siren before the group determines “he
kept goin’,” and then Shawn Jay raps, despon-
dently: “It’s like I got enemies. ’Cause of my race
they hate me.” The song ends with a final, futile
appeal from Smoke — “I’m sick and tired of being
sick and tired,” a recasting of Mississippi Free-
dom Fighter Fannie Fou Hamer’s now-famous
sentiment. The line glides over the repeated
coda of “Leave me alone.” This music couldn’t
be more relevant if it were written tomorrow.

Tar Road

BY

NICK NORWOOD

Come June this brook runs soft,
takes its lumps, before the family
gets AC, your cheap bike busted,
walking tar-heeled, skin-to-skin
with a bruise-black two-laner hot
and spongy underfoot. Everything
existing, it seems like, on a one-
to-one basis. Tbu here, the sun there,
the dark road. An oak, another oak.
The deaf mute’s pitiful house.

A shack, a shed, your uncle’s trailer.
Up ahead, the creek, its drowned
tires like rings of tar flash-cooled
in the au lait water, crawdads
to catch on cotton string, ease out
of the brown ooze, haul home
in a bucket, let stink on a step.

Tour feet reading road like Braille,
the woman with a radio eyes
you from her slack porch, porch-
swinging in 4/4 time. Under-
ground, a dark crude sea atilt
against the earth’s axis, while
at your back, a twang-twaaaang
of AM country steel guitar,
then a crow cawing country blues.

A twang-twang. A twang-twaaaang.
A road disappearing into woods.

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o

With All Their
Heart and Soul

BY

BRIAN ROUST

I n his 1968 B-side track “I Got That Will,”
Atlanta soul singer Hermon Hitson
dreamed aloud of making it big in the music
business, becoming a star, and having his name
in lights. You gonna know me, he proclaimed
exuberantly over a punchy, mid-tempo groove
featuring a guitar riff based loosely on “Ninety-
Nine and a Half (Won’t Do),” Wilson Pickett’s
1966 hit. Pretty girls. Pretty clothes. Do you
know? Dig it!

Hermon’s dream was perfectly plausible in
the 1960s, when the city was flush with black
nightclubs like the Royal Peacock on Auburn
Avenue, which hosted nearly every top r&b
act of the day — stars like Solomon Burke, Ben
E. King, and the Contours — who’d perform
for packed houses, backed by a local band.
In the city’s Sweet Auburn district, just east
of downtown, the traveling r&b stars would
find not just enthusiastic audiences, but well-
appointed black-owned hotels and restaurants.
Despite the Jim Crow laws of the era, Atlanta
was a hub for black talent and entrepreneur-
ship, and Sweet Auburn was home to many
African-American businesses — from one of the
nation’s first black-owned insurance companies
to Soulville Records. Martin Luther King Jr.
was born in the neighborhood, and both the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
and the Julian Bond-led Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee were based there.
And as Bond recalled on a 2005 panel at the
Atlanta History Center, it was common to
move from meeting room to nightclub after
important gatherings among civil rights leaders.

During Sweet Auburn’s heyday, a broth-
erhood of gifted guitar-playing soul singers,
though largely unknown by a wide audience
today, formed a loose collective. They wrote
songs together, recorded them, encouraged
one another, and competed fiercely, each be-
lieving in a coming personal glory that never
came. Today, their records are coveted artifacts
among deep soul collectors and DJs worldwide.
Their stories can be accessed through their
greatest songs.

Do you know? Dig it!

H eartbreak may be a cornerstone of memo-
rable songwriting, but we all know there
are different levels of pain. Take “Why Do Fools
Fall in Love” by Frankie Lymon & the Teenag-
ers, with its finger-snapping, danceable beat,
or the lushly orchestrated David Ruffin hit,
“My Whole World Ended (The Moment You
Left Me).” They sound downright cheerful. On
the other end of the spectrum is James Brown’s
Live at the Apollo album, of which critic Douglas
Wolk wrote : “ He sings as if his lover leaving him
would be the end of the world.” With all due

Soul. Austin, Texas. © Allison V. Smith

OxfordAmerican.org

respect to the Godfather of Soul (and to Mr.
Wolk), there’s another soul song that sounds
practically apocalyptic by comparison. And it
belongs at the very top of the cadre of Atlanta
soul classics — a recording imbued with drama,
grit, and tortured pain, with vocals delivered
as throat-shredding screams. At the beginning
of “Bad Girl,” Lee Moses says he’s going to
tell us about “something that happened to me
long time ago.” Listening to the song, it’s hard
to shake the feeling that he could have just as
easily been dumped in the parking lot of the
recording studio.

Lee Moses was born in 1941, and he grew up
in Mechanicsville, a neighborhood in south-
west Atlanta. According to Rickey Andrews,
a singer and founding member of Atlanta band
the Fabulous Denos, Lee dropped out of high
school to pursue work as a musician. His break
likely came while performing at the famed 81
Theatre on Decatur Street, near downtown.
In the late fifties, local radio station WAOK
sponsored Tuesday-night talent shows at the
8 1 , and the winner would earn a spot playing
at a club on a weekend night. Lee thrived in
this arrangement — as Andrews says, “He could
play anything!” — and he soon became one of

the most sought-after guitarists in town, front-
ing the Showstoppers, the house band at the
Royal Peacock, the premier club on Auburn
Avenue. Everybody wanted to play with Lee
and capture his funky sound on their songs,
but Moses wanted to release his own mate-
rial. His first single was 1967’s “Diana (From
N.Y.C.),” and later that year, he released two
brilliantly arranged and performed instrumen-
tal covers: the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be
There” backed by the Beatles’ “Day Tripper.”
Popular today with DJs, this record did not
suggest the powerful voice that would appear
when Moses’s version of “Bad Girl” hit shops
later in 1967.

“Bad Girl” was originally penned by Bobby
Lee Fears in 1964 for the Fabulous Denos,
which Fears formed inside the walls of Booker
T. Washington High School in Ashby Heights,
near Atlanta’s historically black West End
district. The Denos recorded the cautionary
tale of teenage heartbreak in Macon at the
same studio where James Brown made his first
hit, “Please Please Please.” The Denos chased
success — performing across the country and
in Canada — but Bobby had a difficult time
managing a number of vices ; he had a reputa-

tion for being quick-tempered and prone to
emotional decision making. Back in Atlanta,
as band member Arthur “Dino” Merriwether
recalls, Fears sold the song rights to “Bad Girl”
to Lee Moses for drug money. (Other friends
of Fears acknowledged that the drug money
scenario is plausible, but would not go so far
as to confirm Merriwether’s assertion.) Mo-
ses, who had also attended Washington High,
before dropping out, recorded “Bad Girl” for
the New York-based Musicor label — trans-
forming Fears ’s naive breakup ballad into an
earth-shattering confession of the moment you
know it’s over but you can’t come to terms with
the pain. Where the Fabulous Denos’ original
take on “Bad Girl” is a rather straightforward
doo-wop to r&b reading taken at an upbeat
tempo, Lee slowed it down, intensifying the
emotion, and screamed his way through the
vocals. It sounds as though he’s actually cry-
ing as he sings about an older woman who
everyone warned him would break his heart.
He didn’t listen, and he paid the price. Fears
was wiped from the credits on the 1967 single.

Despite radio play throughout the Southeast,
“Bad Girl” did not chart. Following a handful
of additional singles, Moses released a solo LP

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- 72 -

WINTER 2015

in 1971 called Time «MiiP/ace. It was a commer-
cial flop, though it went on to achieve vaunted
status among rare-record collectors, and it’s now
available thanks to a 2007 reissue. Lee Moses
never had a hit. He continued to gig in Atlanta
until his death in 1997.

M any of Atlanta’s conventional clubs closed
at midnight, but visiting and resident
musicians would congregate for jam sessions
at private venues after their advertised gigs.
These were the places where friendships were
bonded, business transacted, and scores settled.
After he came to Atlanta in 1963, on tour with
his band the Rockin Tonics, at age nineteen,
Hermon Hitson was active in this scene. He
built a reputation in Sweet Auburn as a talented
musician (not to mention a self -professed player
in the city’s healthy pimp culture). Nicknamed
“Sweet Rose,” he drove Cadillacs, wore fine
clothes, and relished the party life.

In 1967, Hermon was hired to play one
weekend at the Night Cap club on Bankhead
Highway to fill in for Lee Moses, who was off
to New York to record with producer Johnny
Brantley, a smooth “Italian looking fella,” as
Hermon remembers (in fact, Brantley was Afri-
can-American). When Lee returned to Atlanta,
he met his temporary replacement, and the
two musicians became fast friends. On Lee’s
recommendation, Brantley secured Hermon a
contract with ATCO Records, where his first
nationally released single was issued in March
the next year. The A-side, “You Are Too Much
for the Human Heart, ” was written by Lee Mo-
ses; the flip was one of Hermon’s called “I Got
That Will.”

It didn’t take long for “You Are Too Much
for the Human Heart” to build traction on
r&b radio along the East Coast. Meanwhile,
Hermon was working hard in the clubs. On
weekends, he often played from 8 p.m. until
midnight at the Plantation in Midtown, then
headed out to Mamie’s Diner on Bankhead.
By that hour, the front door at Mamie’s would
have already been locked, but downstairs the
after-hours club would keep the party going
until sunrise.

On a rainy Friday night in the spring of 1968,
Hermon was taking a young woman home from
Mamie’s when he was attacked by two men who
followed his car. During the confrontation, a
knife fell to the ground, and Hermon picked it
up and slashed one of his attackers so severely
that the man died that night at the hospital.
Hermon was arrested and charged with murder.
Though he was later exonerated, radio stations

quit playing his record, nightclubs shied away
from booking him, and Hermon was dropped
by ATCO altogether, halting the full-length
album he thought he had coming.

The subsequent years brought further trou-
bles. Thanks to Brantley, Hermon managed
to record a couple singles on Minit Records,
released to little fanfare (or sales). In 1969, his
girlfriend was murdered and he was briefly
jailed again, then released before any charges
were filed. His opportunities at stardom fad-
ing, he turned to cocaine and heroin until he
was barely able to function. “Everybody goes
to Hell,” Hermon told me, of that era, “but
everybody don’t make it back.”

Were it not for his friend James Shaw — bet-
ter known as the Mighty Hannibal — Hermon
might not have made it back, either. Hannibal
grew up in Vine City, one of Atlanta’s most
impoverished neighborhoods, and had moved
to Los Angeles in the late 1950s to pursue his
recording career. In L. A. , he became a pimp
before converting to Islam and returning home.
Hannibal stayed with his friend for thirty days
straight to help him break his addiction. He
worked Hermon through a cold-turkey de-
tox and taught him about his faith. “Hannibal
said that we weren’t devil’s food cake, and we
weren’t angel food cake either,” Hermon re-
members now. “That brought me to myself and
after thirty days, I was cool.” Hermon converted
to Islam in 1971.

The Mighty Hannibal also wanted to put
Hermon’s artistry back on the map. When the
after-hours clubs finally closed around 5 A.M.,
Hermon, Hannibal, and another friend, the
guitarist Freddie Terrell, would head back to
Freddie’s house, put on a pot of coffee, and
write songs together. The redemptive “You
Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” came out of
their collaboration.

Early in 1972, Hannibal booked and paid
for studio time at Cheshire Sound on Cheshire
Bridge Road, recruiting Freddie’s Blue Rhythm
Band to back Hermon. “Ain’t No Other Way”
came from that session. From the very first
note, the song jumps into a hard, vamping
groove that announces itself with authority.
There is no count-in, no introductory bars. In-
stead, the instruments come on at once: drums,
horns, guitar, and bass. Throughout the song,
Hermon sings: “I love you, yes I do now, baby,
YOW! Sock it to me, with all my heart and
soul.” The only hint of a reprieve from the
heavy funk onslaught is a simple seven-note
bridge on the guitar that only makes you want
the next verse more.

Hannibal and Hermon shopped the song to a
number of labels but came up empty: by then,
no one seemed prepared to take another chance
on Hermon and his checkered past. He made
the decision to self-release the record, and it
was pressed on his own Sweet Rose label — a
nod to his earlier days as a pimp, and the name
he gave to his guitar.

H ermon’s bond with his contemporaries was
forged on the road with its meager mon-
etary rewards. “A lot of people don’t understand
what we went through,” he says. “You put all
the miles on the car, pay all the musicians their
cut, get a hotel and food night after night, and
then try to explain to your woman why you
don’t have any money when you get home. It’s
hard, man.” Lee, Hermon, and Freddie Terrell,
in particular, shared a close camaraderie — the
proof is on the records themselves, where writ-
ing credits like Hitson-Moses or Hitson-Terrell
are common. They shared songs, too. (“I Got
That Will” was recorded at different times by
Hermon Hitson, Lee Moses, and Mighty
Hannibal.) At heart, these men wanted each
other to succeed.

Before Moses became bandleader for the
Showstoppers, the group’s point man was Jay
Floyd, a bassist who also played guitar for a local
gospel group called the Southern Bells. That
group included the thirteen-year-old Freddie
Terrell, who learned guitar under the tutelage
of Floyd. Within a few years, Freddie joined the
Showstoppers, and not long after that he was
hired by Wilson Pickett, who took him out on
the road. When Freddie came home, in 1969,
he was ready to put together his own group.
The Blue Rhythm Band was born.

One night, they were playing a regular gig at
Soul Gity, a large, integrated nightclub down
the street from Cheshire Sound studio, when a
couple of Capitol Records producers were in the
audience scouting for talent. They approached
Freddie between sets, and two weeks later he
had a date to record at Atlanta’s Master Sound
on Spring Street, the preferred studio for Bill
Lowery, a music-publishing mogul with ties
all across the industry, including a distribu-
tion deal with Capitol Records. Capitol put
out “You Had It Made” and “Why Not Me?”
in January of 1970.

Freddie had written “You Had It Made”
with Hermon during one of their early-morn-
ing sessions. While there is a recognizable
sweetness in the sound, similar to the vo-
cal groups from Philadelphia and Chicago of
that time, the influence of drummer Eddie

OxfordAmerican.org

- 73 -

March 3, 2016

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Study of Southern Culture
and Square Books

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Maxey — with his hard-hitting funky style
and rough-edged vocalizations — roots the
song in the South. If Lee Moses’s “Bad Girl”
is the standard-bearer for an Atlanta sound,
this single is a fine example of that sound
three years later.

Like Jay Floyd, Lee had been an early men-
tor to Freddie and, as he had done for Hermon
before, he introduced Freddie to his manager,
Johnny Brantley, who agreed to use the Blue
Rhythm Band on a Lionel Hampton album
for Brunswick Records. The resulting Them
Changes a collection of hit songs of the pe-
riod played in the soul idiom, with Hampton’s
jazz vibraphone overdubbed from a separate
recording session in New York. As it turned
out, the album didn’t do much to boost Fred-
die’s career, though the exposure had a positive
effect on the band. Freddie is cautious and
wistful in his remembrance of this period.
Today, he is semiretired from music, playing
his guitar primarily in church, though he still
occasionally takes the stage with the Buck-
board Express, Hermon’s current r&b group.
“A lot of the DJs worked the clubs as emcees
in those days, so they knew all the musicians,”
Freddie recalls. Many local DJs began to play
the Hampton record, so more people came
out to the shows. In a city like Memphis or
Chicago, where there was a healthier studio
and record label presence, the Blue Rhythm
Band might have been able to quickly get back
into the studio and keep their momentum
moving forward. Instead, they cracked under
pressure, allowing ego and politics to eat away
at the band from the inside. “Once you get
something going,” he remembers, “it goes
to everyone’s head. Everyone is a superstar.”
They split in 1971 .

T oday, there is little to be found of Atlanta’s
colorful r&b scene. The construction of
three interstate freeways in the late 1960s
permanently splintered many of the city’s
thriving black neighborhoods, which were
further decimated by the construction of
Atlanta-Eulton County Stadium, the Geor-
gia Dome, and Turner Eield. Mercedes-Benz
Stadium — future home of the Falcons — has
cut off access to downtown Atlanta via Martin
Luther King Jr. Boulevard from the west side,
which is predominantly populated by African
Americans. You can still walk by the Royal
Peacock on Auburn Avenue, with its vintage
marquee, though the historic venue is merely
a shell of its former self. The countless clubs
along Simpson Road (now Joseph E. Boone

Boulevard) and Bankhead Highway (now
Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway) have been
torn down, boarded up, or otherwise forgot-
ten. The city too busy to hate has evolved into
the city too busy to remember.

If you walk east down Auburn Avenue from
Peachtree Street to Boulevard, you can see
a little bit of the magic that once was — like
the Prince Hall Masonic Building, the first
Mason lodge organized by African Ameri-
cans and the onetime home to WERD, the
first black-owned radio station in the United
States. While you won’t hear much deep soul
on the stages of Atlanta’s live music venues
today, it is not difficult to trace the lineage of
the city’s modern-day stars back to the 1960s.
After-hours venues still exist — if you know
where to look — as one generation of late-night
partiers continually passes the torch on to the
next. There is a worldwide network of collec-
tors who hunt for original copies of records
from the sixties-era soul brotherhood and their
equally talented ilk — records like “Take Me
Back and Try Me” by Roy Lee Johnson, whom
Otis Redding planned to produce before his
tragic death in a plane crash in 1967, or “Don’t
Take It Out on Me” by Richard Marks, which
has a polished simplicity. The legacy of “Bad
Girl” alone has been passed on to a new gen-
eration of music fans, not only through its
inclusion in the HBO show Girls, but thanks
to young musicians like Eh “Paperboy” Reed,
who recorded the song for his 2009 EP Ace
of Spades.

Many of the old players have passed, but
a few are still around. Hermon Hitson plays
sporadic gigs when he’s asked, and from time
to time his band includes Preddie Terrell on
rhythm guitar. If you’re a bona fide regular
at Northside Tavern, or if you’re lucky, you
might catch Roy Lee Johnson sitting in with
whatever band is playing that night.

The Sweet Auburn soul singers did not find
the fame of contemporaries like Otis Redding,
James Brown, and Aretha Eranklin — all of
whom get a generous shout-out in Hermon’s
“I Got That Will.” Their names never did
make it to the top. Still, their spirit lives on
in contemporary Atlanta; the soul brother-
hood helped create a collaborative environ-
ment that, decades later, would manifest in
the hip-hop scene.

Performers and cities change over time, but
quality music will find its way through the
noise and endure for those curious enough
to find it. Seek out these soul records and
groove.

- 74 -

WINTER 2015

Hmerkana U a Sound

It’s a roots, bluesy kind of groove that springs up between
the toes of your barefoot soul. It’s what life sounds like
when you slow down and listen. And it’s that sway you
get back when music chases worry straight out of your
bones. Franklin is where the roots of music run deep.

^bitTranhlin,com

#FranklinTN

- 7S -

Kelly Hogan in her bedroom (1997)

♦

♦ —

WHEN

• THE

/

/

FIRE

* BROKE
OUT •

♦

♦

♦ *

♦

/ *

' A

* *

LIFE AND DEATH

IN CABBAGETOWN

BY ABIGAIL COVINGTON

I t is said that when Confederate Gen-
eral John Bell Hood torched a reserve
supply train idling on tracks near the
eastern edge of Atlanta, he created the
largest explosion of the Civil War. So
loud was the blast that Union Major
General William T. Sherman heard
it all the way in Jonesboro, twenty miles south. At
this moment Sherman declared, “So Atlanta is ours,
and fairly won.” The fire signaled to Sherman that
Hood, in an effort to contain the collateral damage
of Atlanta’s imminent capture, was destroying the
city’s strategic assets before retreating. Chief among
those assets was the Confederate Rolling Mill, which

was responsible for producing rail track, cannons,
and two-inch sheets of iron for Confederate Navy
vessels. By the time Sherman arrived in Atlanta on
the morning of September 2, 1864, the Confederacy’s
second-largest center of production had burned to
nothing more than a vast swath of charred land. For
nearly twenty-five years afterward, those scorched
acres of southeast Atlanta lay barren and vacant.
Then, in the 1880s, a German immigrant named
Jacob Elsas developed the land and atop the ashes
of the Confederate mill built a new mill. The new
mill was named the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill,
and much like its predecessor, it quickly became a
bastion of productivity.

All photographs by Chris Vcrcne

- 77 -

Jacob Elsas didn’t have to do much
recruiting when it came to filling his
mill with workers. At its peak, he
employed nearly 2,500 men, women,
and children, all of whom lived in
tightly packed shotgun houses that,
when viewed from above, looked as
though they sat under one endless
eave. The workers, many of whom
came from the North Georgia Ap-
palachians, eventually started calling
their settlement Cabbagetown, on ac-
count of the putrid stench that hung _

in the air from the constant boiling of
the cruciferous vegetable. The Cab-
bagetown residents became deeply
familiar with hardship, working
long hours for poor wages, and they
sought refuge in their Appalachian
traditions — particularly music.

The decades passed. In 1914
and ’15, the mill workers went on
strike, but little changed. The com-
pany expanded during the Second
World War, and Elsas established
an on-site nursery. Technological
advancements presaged the closing
of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill,
and in 1978 it locked its iron gates
for good. With their employer no
longer in operation, many of the
mill workers had no choice but to
desert their sequestered village. For
those who couldn’t afford to leave,
the outlook was increasingly bleak.

There weren’t many other businesses in the area,
and for every house that was inhabited a dozen
more were swiftly abandoned. Cabbagetown
became a deeply depressed part of Atlanta, but
the neighborhood continued to bring forth mu-
sic, as it had always done. The folk singer Joyce
Brookshire — who stayed in the neighborhood,
working tirelessly with friends to ensure the
well-being of her fellow lintheads who also
stayed behind — hosted jam sessions at her house
for local musicians, using music as a salve as she
watched the neighborhood decline: “We’d sing
old songs / About our mountain home / Our
music would see us through.”

Other parts of southeast Atlanta were flour-
ishing. A mini artistic renaissance swept through
the area in the mid-eighties and brought with it
new, alternative music venues, some fashioned
out of abandoned bank vaults and warehouses.
Bands were everywhere. Little Five Points soon
became home to some of Atlanta’s biggest ven-
ues. It was only a matter of time until people

discovered the small, musically inclined and
struggling neighborhood next door.

W hen I first arrived in Cabbagetown,
on Memorial Day weekend in 2015,
I took a quick tour of the area before
meeting with a guitarist named Bill Taft, who
played music here in the eighties and nineties.
1 visited the long-abandoned Fulton Bag and
Cotton Mill, which has been transformed into
a gated community of lofts stylishly designed
to blend in with the ruins. Many of the mill’s
crumbling exterior facades had been preserved,
but they look anachronistic now, flanked by
modern touches like an enormous swimming
pool and a parking garage. A few blocks south
is Little’s Food Store, which has been open since
1929, surviving decades of economic vulnerabil-
ity. 1 met Taft next to Little’s, at a table outside
of the Carroll Street Cafe.

Taft was a member of a band called the Chow-
der Shouters, and his bandmates, Eric Kaiser and
John Thomas (called JT), were among the first
people to move into the neighborhood after the
mill closed and many of the lintheads left. They
came in 1986 and Taft, a classmate of JT’s from
Emory, arrived shortly after. He’d heard about
Cabbagetown “on the news, as that place where
cops shoot kids at night,” he told me. Quick to
befriend them was poet and performance artist
Tim Ruttenber, who’d moved to the area the
year before. Ruttenber was a transgressive guy:
he had been expelled from high school and col-
lege; he’d spent years in a North Carolina com-
mune, in a meditative state that was punctuated
by bouts of thorough drug experimentation.
He often came to Atlanta to visit his brother
Jim. Ruttenber came to love the city, moved
there, and eventually started hanging out in
Cabbagetown at night, working during the day
as a construction worker. He and the Chowder
Shouters soon began performing together, and

- 7S -

WINTER 2015

The Rock*A*Teens and the Cabbagetown mill (1995)

from their raucous and creative collaborations
emerged Ruttenber’s onstage persona: Deacon
Lunchbox.

According to Ruttenber, Deacon Lunchbox
was “a socially conscious redneck poet using
backwoods Southern imagery to espouse a pro-
gressive political stance.” Deacon Lunchbox
wasn’t a radical departure from Ruttenber’s
own persona; he was an amplification, a way
for Ruttenber to act bold and defiant in front
of an audience. Through Deacon Lunchbox,
Ruttenber channeled his keen sense of social
justice and appreciation for irony. When he per-
formed, he would strap plastic breasts to his
chest and brandish a chainsaw, speaking in a deep
Southern drawl, full of ire about the despicable
nature of prejudice. Offstage, Ruttenber was a
gentle bear of a man, full of compassion. The
support he lent to his friends’ bands when he
opened for them helped buoy the developing
music culture. Ruttenber was once featured
in a WSB-TV human-interest story and, upon
being asked what the secret to his poetry was,
retorted, “Failure. Failure is where it’s at. ” This
idea left an indelible impression on Taft, who
told me, “1 thought of it as a tremendous open-
ing of my consciousness.”

By 1990, many young people — primarily
friends of friends of Taft and JT — flocked to the
neighborhood, united in their desire to explore
music. Atlanta musicians like Kelly Hogan,
Chris Lopez, Coleman Lewis, Chan Marshall,
and dozens of others moved there, occupying
the houses where Jacob Elsas ’s mill workers
had lived. The musicians cross-pollinated, and
informal DIY bands started sprouting up like
weeds between cracks in the pavement.

Kelly Hogan was the neighborhood’s prized
vocalist; her passionate, sultry voice endeared
her to the entire community. She sang with many
bands, most notably the Jody Grind — which
fused disparate elements like jazz and country
and cabaret and punk. The Jody Grind’s music
shouldn’t have worked, but it did, thanks to
Hogan’s singing. It’s mesmerizing. On parts
of the band’s debut album. One Man’s Trash Is
Another Man’s Treasure, the instrumentation
melts in the wake of Hogan’s voice and creates a
beautiful, harmonious wash for her to sing over.
Theband’s version of Ellington’s “Mood Indigo”
is nothing more than the steady and pared-back
strumming of Taft’s guitar and the soft skim-
ming of a hi-hat. Concurrently, Hogan’s voice
sinks into her lowest register then soars into
the upper octaves of her range to spellbinding
effect. “We were all just in love with making
music,” Hogan told me of these years.

Two other important bands at this time were
the Opal Foxx Quartet and Smoke, vehicles for
the songwriting and theatrics of Robert Cur-
tis Dickerson — a delightfully unhinged and
frighteningly insightful drag performer from
Jonesboro, Georgia, who went by the name
Benjamin. If Tim Ruttenber was Cabbagetown’s
beloved, redneck father, then Benjamin was its
nurturing, cross-dressing mother, and the other
members of the Opal Foxx Quartet their ragtag
group of children. A mix between a circus and
a band, the Opal Foxx Quartet’s primary pur-
pose was to write and play loose arrangements
that matched Benjamin’s coarsely sung poetry.
Benjamin began Smoke a while later, after he
pared down the Opal Foxx Quartet. “Smoke
is the sound of Cabbagetown to me,” Hogan
said. She’s right that Smoke’s sound personifies
the scene: the music is eerie and crooked, and
Benjamin’s craggy voice and brooding, swollen
eyes seem to embody the hardship that dogged
the neighborhood’s residents.

But despite the excitement around the Jody
Grind, the Opal Foxx Quartet, Smoke, and all
the other collaborations happening in Cabbage-
town in these years, it was a later band called
the Rock*A‘Teens that became a true center-
piece of the scene. Smoke may have personified
Cabbagetown’s vibe, but it was this band that
preserved its history. As Atlanta-based journalist

Doug Deloach told me: “To tell the story of the
Rock'A'Teens is to also tell the story of Cabbag-
etown and aU the bands that came before them. ”

* • #

T he Rock*A*Teens came along in the early
nineties, after a string of tragedies rocked
the Cabbagetown community and unrav-
eled several of these bands. One night in 1992,
along a lonesome stretch of Highway 65 near
Greenville, Alabama, Tim Ruttenber and two
members of the Jody Grind — their bassist, Rob-
ert Hayes, and drummer, Rob Clayton — were
killed instantly when a drunk driver crossed
over a grassy median and hit their van head-on.
The group was on its way back to Georgia after
performing a series of shows in North Florida.
Bill Taft and Kelly Hogan had opted to stay in
Pensacola and drive back the next morning; they
didn’t learn of the tragedy until they returned to
Cabbagetown the next day. Taft once detailed his
reaction in Creative Loafing: “I got to my house
and my wife came out and I knew the minute I
saw her something bad had happened. She told
me, and I just stood there and started crying.”
For those who knew Ruttenber, Hayes,
and Clayton, the accident was unfathomable.
“How could Tim be gone?” JT once reflected.
The traumatic end to the Jody Grind and the

Benjamin at home (ca. 1992)

OxfordAmerican.org

- 79 -

sudden absence of Deacon Lunchbox affected
even those who didn’t live in Cabbagetown.
Record producer and Indigo Girls member Amy
Ray told me that the “car accident created this
overarching sadness in Cabbagetown that just
snowballed. It was so tragic and shocking.”
Many of the musicians who played in the
Opal Foxx Quartet were affected, too, especially
future Rock*A*Teens front man Chris Lopez and
his dear friend Allen Page. Page was a versatile
drummer who also played with Lopez in Cab-
bagetown ’s metal bands: Dirt, Seersucker, and
the New Centurions, a group that began when
Benjamin ended the Opal Foxx Quartet. He was
a bit of a wild man — once, after band practice,
he shot a hole through the ceiling of Lopez’s
house at 71 1 Wylie Street. “Allen was a sweet,
wonderful human being and a great drummer, ”
Athens-based producer David Barbe told me.
“But he also had a problem that got the best
of him.” On February 28, 1994, right before a
New Centurions gig. Page overdosed on heroin
while sitting in his car, which was parked right
outside of 71 1 Wylie. Everyone I talked to said
the same thing: his death felt like lightning
striking the same place twice.

Hogan is an eloquent woman, but when it
came to discussing Page’s death, she was nearly
speechless. “It was just — fuck, man, fuck.” She
remembered simply wanting “everybody to
stop dying. ” I asked her what she did after Page
died. She said, “We all just kept playing music.”
Taft and Hogan continued to meet up every
Thursday for practice. Taft also joined Smoke.
Chris Lopez stayed at 711 Wylie, and Hogan

wandered there to play, too. Lopez began teach-
ing Hogan guitar and soon they were writing to-
gether. Lopez’s friend from work, Chris Verene,
eventually offered himself as their drummer and
brought Justin Hughes, a young guitarist, with
him. Without clear direction, the four of them
jammed, Chris Lopez writing the songs. It was
the spring of 1994 and what would soon become
the Rock*A*Teens was still nothing more than
a group of friends getting together and writing
music about all they’d been through.

I n telling the Rock*A*Teens’ origin story, it’s
tempting to jump to obvious conclusions:
They were sad so they played loud music; X
happened so then Y occurred. And sometimes
this hypothesis holds up. I sheepishly asked
Lopez if he thought the tragedies he experienced
affected his songwriting process. “I don’t really
have any idea,” he said. “No more so than other
things, I guess.” I could picture his shoulders
shrugging over the phone. He did admit that if
he hadn’t been living in Cabbagetown, “a lot
of those songs would’ve never been written.”
Chris Verene put it more candidly: “We were
definitely united by people dying and a sense
of loss.”

Despite Lopez’s hesitance to admit it, images
from Cabbagetown clearly found their way into
his writing — a wild thatch of overgrown kudzu
wrapped around the bumper of a rotted-out car,
a dingy shopping cart full of old Busch Light
precariously parked in the middle of Carroll

Street. So did confessions of his grief over Allen
Page’s death. Lopez’s powerful lyrics demanded
a band, and his three friends could sense some-
thing coming. Verene remembers that time this
way: “It wasn’t a band at first. It was just us
playing, but once we started putting songs to-
gether, it was electric. ” The way they all tell it,
the Rock*A*Teens started sort of by accident,
only after realizing they had written a handful
of really good songs. Verene recognized the
Rock*A*Teens’ piquant flavoring and prodded
them along. He even named the band. From the
very start, the Rock*A*Teens were unrestrained
in their outpourings . Thinking about their rau-
cous start-up sound, I’m reminded of a Smoke
lyric from the song “Awake” : “When heartache
rears her ugly head, well I’ll look her in the eye
and I’ll kiss her on the mouth. I’ll hold my head
up high.” That’s what the Rock*A*Teens sound
like — battered but defiant in the face of death.

Aiding them in their effort was Chris Lopez’s
amp — an old Epiphone Futura. When it came to
fulfilling the Rock*A*Teens’ rebellious reverb
sound, that amp did a lot of the heavy lifting.
Turned all the way up, it could create its own
sporadic sonic distortions, which only furthered
the on-the-fly sound the Rock*A*Teens became
known for. “I don’t think we could’ve sounded
the way we did without that amp,” Lopez told
me. And the way they sounded wasn’t like
anything else going on at the time. In the post-
Nirvana alt-rock soundscape of the mid-nineties,
the Rock*A*Teens were an outlier, even within
their own city. Seattle had grunge, but rockabilly
was the rage in Atlanta, and the Rock*A*Teens

- 80 -

WINTER 2015

Left: Chris Lopez at 711 Wylie Street recording session (1995) ] Right: The Rock*A*Teens with Augie on Kelly’s couch (1996)

particularly enjoyed lampooning that scene.
“Don’t make me go to the rockabilly ghetto /
Don’t leave me behind,” Lopez shouts over a
dramatic chord progression and ironic saloon-
style piano plunking. While it’s spectacularly
shambolic, the song is far from discordant thanks
to Kelly Hogan’s punctuated vocals.

Throughout the Rock*A*Teens’ first two
albums — The Rock*A*Teens and Cry — Hogan’s
spare but stirring vocals act as guardrails that
keep a freewheeling Chris Lopez from sing-
ing himself right off a cliff. But Hogan left
the band in 1996, and it’s after then that Lo-
pez’s voice breaks from the mold, particularly
on their Merge Records debut. Baby, a Little
Rain Must Fall. In those songs, Lopez sounds
entirely uncaged, and perhaps nowhere in the
Rock*A*Teens’ discography does he ululate more
violently than on the track “I Could’ve Just
Died,” a piece Herculean in both its music and
lyrics. The song opens with a spine-straightening
coupling — the ride cymbal and snare drum —
and then barrels into a wailing wall of reverb
and distortion. Lopez exhausts himself a few
times and abandons this lyric before he’s able
to pronounce its final syllable: “liiiiiiiiii, yeah I
could’ve / just diiiieeeeeeeeee ...” He trails off
before audibly inhaling and screaming it again.
Lopez spares no part of himself.

There are times when I listen to this song and
I imagine myself at a house party where someone
has just busted through the front door and deliv-
ered urgent, buzz-crushing news — the energy
that’s left is channeled into a sorrowful swivet as
people start abandoning the party at breakneck
speeds; I fall on my face; I pick myself back up
and keep running; I search for a safe house and
a couch to crash on; I am crying in the wind. By
the end of the song, I am exhausted.

Though their music didn’t really have any kind
of predetermined style, the Rock*A*Teens had
plenty of influences — especially late fifties rock &
roll and how that geme related to rhythm. Some
of their songs are so fast — think Link Wray, Dick
Dale, Bo Diddley. When they got onstage, “it
would be even faster than we planned,” Verene
said. “It required me to play at my utmost.” In
clips of the band’s early concerts, you can see in
Verene ’s and Hughes’s wincing faces the physi-
cal effort they exerted in order to keep up with
Lopez’s manic performance. Imagine taking the
already hypercharged “'ibu’re Goima Miss Me” by
the garage-psych rockers the 13 th Floor Elevators
and doubling the beats-per-minute. That might
get you somewhere close to the pacing of “Lucia
R,” from the Rock*A*Teens’ debut album. The
grandiosity of it all, the emotional lyrics, the

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ambitious arrangements, the cinematic imagery,
the yowling — this strange combination of ele-
ments was unprecedented at the time. It’s only
recently that the anthemic sound put forth by
the Rock*A*Teens has come into vogue, thanks
to the success of Arcade Fire.

If the Rock*A*Teens had any kind of defin-
ing feature it was their commitment to a lack of
pretense. Amy Ray, who signed the group to her
label. Daemon Records, said, “They had a totally
different kind of ambition. They were ambitious
in the moment and only about the art.” From
the way they dressed onstage — usually in some
uncoordinated assortment of khaki-colored gar-
ments and thick-rimmed glasses — to their own
laconic explanations for their critically lauded
albums, the Rock*A*Teens represented what
it means to make music without an agenda, al-
most to an extreme. Album sales or mailing lists
didn’t matter much to the band. They focused
exclusively on writing music. Oftentimes, Ray
felt like she was more enthusiastic about the
band’s prospects than they were. Validating
moments — like signing with Daemon and later
getting picked up by Merge — encouraged the
Rock*A*Teens to keep making music. But ac-
cording to Kelly Hogan, “Those things just hap-

pened. We weren’t ever trying to get signed.”

When I asked Ray if she thought the band
ever deliberately undermined their chances
at success, she was quick to reply, “Not at all.
They were just non-compromising and true to
their community.”

The song “If I Wanted to Be Famous (I’d Have
Shot Someone)” is like an anthem in that way.
Its dark, wry lines could have been plastered on
the entrance to Cabbagetown to ward off any
opportunistic musicians with suitcases full of
professional ambitions. But everyone in Atlanta
who knew about Cabbagetown knew it wasn’t
where you went to get famous. It wasn’t Brook-
lyn. It wasn’t even Seattle. If anything, it was the
antithesis of those destinations. It was a place
where opportunity was sacrificed at art’s altar.
At the beginning of the song “Arm in Arm, in
the Golden Twilite, We Loitered On ...” Lopez
sings of a person who “doesn’t come around as
much / Ever since he heard about that stuff.”
By describing this friend who no longer feels
safe coming around, Lopez perfectly evokes the
place that friend refuses to visit — a place where
harrowing incidents occur more frequently
than one would like. Lopez said to me, “In my
heart of hearts, I hope that these lyrics invoke

a mythological place.” Except that place isn’t
mythological at all. It’s just Cabbagetown.

A s I walked around the neighborhood in
May, I saw remnants of the place that
Chris Lopez had borne witness to in his
songs. Many of the houses have been repainted,
in pastel yellow and blue, but their porches’
floorboards remain crooked and uneven. Where
there once were dusty lots, there are now mani-
cured front lawns — but the earth beneath them
still sinks in odd places. Even recent upgrades
to 71 1 Wylie can’t completely mask its history.
The low-pitched roof and humble front porch
reveal its past as a tattered mill house.

Not everybody wants to revisit the past.
Kelly Hogan left Cabbagetown in 1997. “I just
couldn’t keep driving down the street where
Allen had died,” she said to me in a tearful mo-
ment on the phone. Verene also moved away
after the band signed to Merge. That left Chris
Lopez alone to play the drums on Baby, a Little
Rain Must Fall — after which the drummer Bal-
lard Lesemann joined, soon followed by Will
Joiner on bass. The Olympics came and went

^ STAX WUSfUM
OF. AMERICAN SOUl MUSIC

Hpy

CELEBRATING SAM & DAVE, OTIS REDDING, ISAAC HAYES,
BOOKER T. & THE MGs, AND HUNDREDS OF OTHERS EVERY DAY

- 82 -

WINTER 2015

and brought masses of yuppies to the city’s less-
crowded parts. Then it was 1998. The people
who still lived in Cabbagetown could finally
sense that their neighborhood was changing.

To borrow a phrase from Hogan, Cabbagetown
in the nineties was like a “supersaturated solu-
tion.” People fell in and out of love, friends died,
babies were bom. Things that generally happen
to most people over the span of one lifetime,
across many places, had happened at warp speed to
several people within a few cramped acres of land
in southeast Atlanta. One more dose of pain and
the whole neighborhood could combust, which it
did, after Benj amin died of liver failure caused by
hepatitis C on January 29, 1999. “All of us being
close to Benjamin, and appreciating his art, united
us in some way,” Chris Verene said. Benjamin’s
death also meant the end of Smoke. For so long,
Benjamin’s presence had been as towering as the
smokestacks that loomed over Cabbagetown.
His death turned what was already a chasm into
a void, and most of the neighborhood’s remaining
residents scattered elsewhere.

On April 12, 1999, the old Fulton Bag and
Cotton Mill did as the Confederate Rolling Mill
had done all those years before: it caught fire.
The mill — the longstanding emblem of Cab-
bagetown ’s history — was in the midst of being
renovated into lofts and condominiums when
the flames hit. “When did the Cabbagetown
scene end?” I asked almost every person 1 in-
terviewed. The answer was unanimous : “When
the fire broke out.” Chris Lopez continued to
live at 711 Wylie Street until 2001, long after
his friends had moved — to Chicago, to New
York, into the firmament, across town. But to a
chronicler, a story’s ending is just as pertinent as
its begirming. The fire at the miU and Benjamin’s
death — these things were now as much a part of
Cabbagetown ’s history as the lintheads and the
loss of Allen Page. Lopez had one more chapter
to write, which he did, ever so nostalgically,
on the hand’s final album, Sweet Bird of Youth.

On this album, recorded in 2000, everything
has already happened. Lopez writes in the past
tense about nights when “we were young
and we ran circles round all the pretty ones,”
about the “town that put us under,” and about
“how they left and how it stung.” Sweet Bird
of Youth isn’t a defiant last stand; it’s a eulogy.
The Rock*A*Teens had outlived every other
Cabbagetown band and, through five albums
and various lineups, reluctantly preserved the
history of the neighborhood until it drew its
final fiery breath. Then it was done. “Strike
down the band,” Lopez mourns. “The play has
closed.”

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'W' H Y AT HENS ?

by

David Barbe

R ock music fans know the basics; the B-52’s begat Pylon, Pylon
begat R.E.M., etc. But that hardly explains why there is a fa-
mous music scene here, of all places. What is it about Athens?
Well, for starters, Athens is a college town. Every fall there is
an influx of bright, creative, young people on the verge of discovery.
And of course there are economic considerations, namely cheap rent,
cheap beer, and affordable practice spaces. The less money one needs,
the less time spent at work, the more time one has to start a band, throw
a house party, or hop in a van and go on tour.

Today, the fact remains that people from other places most associ-
ate the music of Athens with R.E.M. To Athenians, the influence of
R.E.M.’s music is equal to the impact of their attitude about it and the
way they went about their business. > >

Illustrations by Seth Fountain

■ S5 -

“We’re not the best rock & roll
band in America.” That’s what
drummer Bill Berry said when
that title was bestowed upon
R.E.M. on the cover of Rolling
Stone in December 1987. In-
stead, Berry gave that distinction
to Pylon, who by then had been
disbanded for a few years. This
was not the only time a member
of R.E.M. sidestepped accolade,
choosing instead to share the
spotlight with a lesser-known
hometown band.

R.E.M. ’s public support of
the Athens music scene is well
known, but they were also sup-
portive in private ways. Local
bands were able to score coveted
opening slots on their shows,
and the band members kept
newer (read: poorer) musicians
supplied with barely used bass
strings and drumsticks. They es-
tablished a practice of reaching
out (or down, or back, depend-
ing on your point of view) and
paying it forward — propping up
their contemporaries. In turn, as
the recipients of their generos-
ity developed their own careers,
they continued the trend. Drive-
By Truckers, Futurebirds, and
of Montreal give local bands
high-profile opening slots.

Widespread Panic covers songs
by Bloodkin and Vic Chesnutt.

Hell, they even wrote a song
called “Love Tractor.”

Perhaps of greater impor-
tance than opening slots, press
mentions, and free drumsticks
is this: R.E.M. treated people
well — employees, crew, venue
owners, radio deejays, writers,
opening bands, local charities,
everybody. They weren’t too big for their britches. This was true when
they were a rising force in small clubs and on college radio, and it remained
true when they became international superstars. R.E.M. ’s kindness
permeated the culture here. Turns out it’s a lot more enjoyable to make
friends than enemies.

I RRRIVED IN 1981 as a seventeen-year-old college freshman, and
although 1 knew about the B-52’s, who were already sort of stars by then,
I was in the dark about the real underground scene. The nudge for me
was in UGA’s student newspaper, the Red & Black. One day, I saw a
picture of a local band. Little Tigers, and a mention of their show that

night. 1 recognized the bassist as a former bandmate from my adolescent
years in Atlanta, so I decided to check it out.

Walking into the 40 Watt Club was like entering a new world. It was a
packed room of maybe a hundred people (did it hold that many?) dancing,
moving as one pulsating throng. Everybody was having a good time and
seemed to know everybody else. Even better, it seemed like nobody on
the outside had any idea this thing existed.

OCCRSIONRLLY, I RUN INTO people who were here thirty years
ago (or twenty, or ten) and then left for a more sensible adult pursuit.
Inevitably, they ask me if the Athens music scene of today is anywhere

ATHENS X ATHENS

“The Guitar Player” (2015), by Terry Rowlett. From the collection of Blair and Betsy Dorminey. Courtesy of the artist

AxA

near as good as it was in their own halcyon col-
lege years. I’ve always given the same response:
“It’s even better.” This answer is often met with
disbehef. “It can’t be.” “Impossible.” “Itwas so
special then. ” It was special then, no doubt about
it. Nonetheless, it keeps on growing.

In 2015, the music scene in Athens is a far
different animal from 1981, when there were
a couple of clubs and a handful of art-school
bands. Today there are hundreds of local mu-
sicians encompassing rock, hip-hop, country,
jazz, EDM, post-punk. Jam, reggae, pop, metal,
whatever. There are myriad live music venues.
There are professional recording studios (and a
zillion home versions). There are record labels,
managers, booking agents, publicists, concert
promoters, bloggers, and graphic designers.
There is greater synergy with the University
of Georgia and the music community. The Will-
son Center for Humanities and Arts promotes
a downtown music festival. Every year of its
decade of existence, the UGA Music Business
Program, where I work, has set new records for

student apphcations.

The music scene is bigger and, yes, it is dif-
ferent, but a creative movement cannot remain
stagnant if it is to remain vital. You have to
keep on moving. In spite of all of this growth,
transformation, and official business, there are
some things that remain the same, or at least feel
born of a similar spirit. There is still a strong
DIY ethic. There are still house parties, and
loads of new bands. Just as in the mid-1980s
we added Bar-B-Q Killers, the La-Di-Da’s, Eat
America, Porn Orchard, and Time Toy, in the
mid-2010s we now have New Madrid, Muuy
Biien, Shade, the Hernies, Grand Vapids, and
Ruby the RabbitFoot, to name just a few.

THE BRTTLE BETWEEN RRT and

commerce is an old one. Maybe the music scene
in Athens thrives because the relationship be-
tween the two is more about coexistence than
competition. Maybe it really is the cheap rent
and cheap beer. Maybe it’s just luck.

Maybe it’s just a thing that is. "I

DON CHAMBERS

(SINGER/SONGWRITER)

T o participate in the Athens scene of the late eighties and early nineties, you didn’t
have to be a freak, but if you couldn’t hang with the guy in the dress, the girl with
the chicken-foot necklace, or half a dozen reprobates with a powerful distaste for
popular culture (which they expressed through scathing sarcastic humor) — well, then
you would be uncomfortable. The streets may be a bit cleaner today, but at its heart this
place remains the proverbial Petri dish in a science lab, a strange cultish summer camp
that never ended, a circus that never left town.

DAVE SCHOOLS

(WIDESPREAD PANIC)

A fter R.E.M. got big with their

trademark Southern Gothic jangle,
a whole new crop of bands came up
in their hometown and the scene quickly
split into two distinct camps. One was an
aggressive art-punk sound represented
by groups like the Bar-B-Q Killers, Porn
Orchard, and Mercyland. The other camp
was governed more or less by traditional
songwriting and guitar-driven soloing
(read: hippies), and at the epicenter were
Widespread Panic, Bloodkin, and White
Buffalo. If you were to revisit the local
rags of the day, the ink would give you
the idea that these two tines were dia-
metrically opposed and hated each other.
Their fans most likely did.

I remember a helluva daylong house
party out on North Avenue, where all of
the “hippie” bands played sets. A steady
supply of keg beer ensured that the
momentum of the party kept increasing
as the day progressed. The cops never
showed up, but plenty of “punks” came
to take part in the revelry. Rick Berg did
his famous cock sock dance on the roof
(always a sure sign of a great party in
those days) and fell off into the bushes
seemingly unhurt. After the beer taps
had run dry, the party turned inward,
and we found ourselves hanging out in
a bedroom, passing around a bottle of
liquor and a bong. While my bandmate
Mikey Houser and Laura Carter drank
stashed beers, I shared a pipe with my
friend Deanna Mann, a local artist. Half
joking, I said something about the passing
of a peace pipe, since certain music writers
in town were fond of playing up the sup-
posed animosity between our spheres.

We had each come to Athens for an ed-
ucation, but we stayed because we found
a freedom in which we could thrive as
artists and as members of a community
not unlike a “Mayberry on acid,” as some
of us called it. There was a time when
music writers pondered what was in the
drinking supply that made Athens such a
productive source.

I can tell you this about Athens: It
ain’t the water.

It’s the people.

ATHENS X ATHENS

- 87 -

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AxA

'WELCOME

HIN'OES

by

Art Rosenbaum

O ne summer evening in 1 9 8 1 , 1 knocked
on the door of a modest house on a street
improbably named the Plaza in Athens,
Georgia, looking for a man who, 1 had
been told, knew some old-time work songs.
Around town, people were aware that 1 was
interested in the vernacular, rather than the
popular, music of the region, and an acquain-
tance had heard an African-American cement
finisher he hired to put in a driveway singing a
song to the strokes of his pickax. The listener
recognized this as the kind of work songs John
and Alan Lomax and others had recorded in the
prisons of the South, and called me. When a very
portly Henry Grady Terrell opened the door,
we both said, almost in unison, “1 know you!”
We had met before, at the home of gospel sing-
ers Doc and Lucy Barnes on the other side of town,
a house that Terrell had named the Holy Ghost
Headquarters, because, in Doc’s words, “We have
more .singing here than in any church I ” Terrell had
sung informally and in gospel groups with Doc,
and had given up the singing of worldly songs —
unless he thought no one was hstening — so at first
he was reluctant to admit to knowing the work

songs. After some persuasion he agreed to give
it a try, and we went over to Doc’s house, where
“Big Boy” Terrell started swinging a pickax — he
couldn’t give voice to the song without doing the
work it was bound to — and sang:

I’m gonna ring — wbab! — this old ham-
mer — whah!

I’m gonna ring — wbab! — this old ham-
mer — whah!

And then go home — whah! — oh partner —
whah! — and then go home — wbab!

And similarly:

or John Henry died on the mountain

He was a-whipping steel

Ain’t gonna tell nobody my right name,

My name is Sam, and I don 'tgive a — whah!

Anybody ask you was I running,

Tell ’em I was flying

I’m going ’cross the Blue Ridge Mountain

’Tore the sun goes down. > >

CLAIRE CAMPBELL

(HOPE FOR AGOLDENSUMMER)

T he lady standing in my sister’s

front yard is wearing Bart Simpson
pajamas. It is 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday.
She is sobbing and asking, “Why?”

Why? Why? Why?

I know why.

It is because we are having another
house party.

My sister. Page, lives in John
Fernandes’s purple house at the end of
Boulevard. Tbu will know John’s name
because he has been in almost every
Elephant 6 band. He is a psychedelic
fiddler, a landlord, and he’s sanctioned
this party that will surely leave the
linoleum sticky with beer, the floorboards
covered in red clay.

To start, my tiny folk band, Hope for
Agoldensummer, premieres our music
video and serves pie (three pumpkins from
the nearby Washington Farms yields two
pies, but there are one hundred fifty people
at this party). After pie we have Music
Hates You. They’re a shredding, bawdy,
overdriven tumbleweed. They are our
opposite and we love them. In lieu of cash
payment, we have made them a goodie bag
full of Halloween candy, mini bottles of
Jameson, items of questionable legahty.

Music Hates Tbu’s sound check is
ear piercing and takes too long. Page’s
neighbors begin to appear on the front
lawn, demanding to see her. By the time
the band starts their first song. Page and
I are standing in the front yard, tipsy,
taking a severe cussing from the woman
in Bart Simpson PJs. She calls Page a great
many obscenities, such as “bitch” and
“townie.” She weeps, “Why would you
do this on a Sunday night? Why?”

A policeman arrives. “Ma’am,” he tells
Page, “I heard the band from two miles
away. Two miles!” We are issued a noise
violation ticket. I stop the band after their
third song. All the PJs go home. All the
townies go home. We watch Twin Peaks
and share a slice of pie I’d kept hidden.

The W. B. Thomas Gospel Chorus of the Greater Macedonia Baptist Church,

Athens, Georgia (1977), by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum ATHENS X ATHENS - sa -

AxA

ANDREW RIEGER

(ELF POWER)

O utlets for new music were limited when 1 was growing up in the small, conservative
town of Greenwood, South Carolina, in the seventies and eighties. Before MTV
became ubiquitous, my brother and I would sit for hours in front of the radio listen-
ing to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown, making detailed lists of the current hits, and
alternate charts of our own Top 40. This early record keeping turned into a serious project
in 1983, when 1 began making a list of every show I’ve ever attended (*1 : country-rock
band Alabama). Keeping count all these years has been a consistent pleasure in my life,
and friends will often ask me to consult the List to clarify what year and at which club a
certain band played. I recently surpassed 3,500 shows. Some do stand out:

#7 REPLRCEMENTS / DRIVIN N CRYIN (1987)

When I was in high school, my dad drove me and some of my friends the hour and a half
to Athens to see this show at the Tate Student Center on UGAs campus. The Replace-
ments were so drunk that more than once they started playing the same song they had
just finished. Their sloppy, drunken buffoonery was a revelation. 1 learned that good
songs and good energy could be more important than technical proficiency.

#98 NIRVRNR / DRS DRMEN (1991)

The 40 Watt Club saw many national acts stop through on their way to greater fame, in-
cluding Nirvana’s crazed performance, which happened right as “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
was taking over MTV and radio. By the end of the show, Kurt Cobain had torn down the
film screen hanging above the stage, blanketing the first few rows of sweaty fans, who
then dutifully ripped it to shreds.

#154 GWRR / MELVINS (1992)

These theatrical space-metalheads and grunge masters were shut down mid-set at
the Georgia Theatre. The Athens-Clarke County police officers cited obscenity after
GWAR’s elaborately constructed fake papier-mache cuttlefish ejaculated fake semen and
blood all over the appreciative audience. The band later teamed up with the ACLU and
received an apology and out-of-court settlement from the Athens police.

#248 JRCK ’0’ NUTS (1993)

The math-rock noise fiends kicked off this show at the Georgia Bar without Laura Carter,
their maniacal and diminutive singer. She made her entrance in the tiny service elevator
used to transport booze from the storeroom upstairs, surprising the crowd as she leapt
from the elevator, grabbed the microphone, and seamlessly joined the band mid-song!

#1332 BRLLRRD LESEMRNN WITH MICHAEL STIPE (2002)

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of R.E.M.’s debut EP, Chronic Town, Flagpole Mag-
azine’s music editor performed it in its entirety at the Engine Room, singing and playing
bass to prerecorded drums and guitar. When Michael Stipe caught wind of the show, he
arrived unannounced to sing backup vocals.

#3103 JANDEK (2012)

For almost fifteen years, I have put on shows with my Elf Power bandmate Laura Carter
(unrelated to the late Jack ’O’ Nuts legend of the same name) at the Orange Twin Con-
servation Community, a 150-acre eco-village with a natural ampitheatre in the woods. In
2012, we hosted the unlikely performance of reclusive experimental artist Jandek, backed
by members of Deerhunter and Olivia Tremor Control. Jandek later released that night’s
ethereal and haunting improvisational piece as a live album.

Terrell’s singing was no rough chant, but
showed a mastery of phrasing and vocal orna-
mentation. He demonstrated how he and his
fellow workers would take a break by twirl-
ing the pick over his head, like the rotors of
a helicopter, to amuse the boss man while
they caught their breath. His song evoked
hard times, grueling labor, and the determi-
nation of a man “scouting,” escaping across
the mountains. He had never been in prison,
but he learned the songs from former convicts
and others on road gangs. He reaffirmed that
he preferred to sing spiritual songs, but “the
other kind of singing, that’s way back when
you were — beating a dog with a ’simmon tree!
The world was on fire, then. They put that fire
out, on them jobs.”

When I moved to Athens in 1976, to teach
studio art at the university, the influential rock
music scene was yet to burst forth. 1 soon met
the fiddler and singer Gordon Tanner, son of
Gid Tanner, founder of the 1920s and ’30s
string band the Skillet Lickers, who lived be-
tween Athens and Atlanta; the EUers, a family
of old-time musicians in the mountains a couple
of hours north; Maude Thacker, a mountain
singer of old ballads; and many more. When
the rock scene did emerge, most — though not
all — of its young musicians were ignorant of
and indifferent to the vernacular music of the
region. Michael Stipe, a curly-haired and in-
tensely imaginative student in my class — later
to be the front man of the celebrated rock band
R.E.M. — for example, was more interested in
the type of creativity and aura projected by
Andy Warhol than by earlier blues, or even
r&b, said to be the sources of rock & roll. This
would change , at least for Michael, when he met
Reverend Howard Finster, whose prolific and
antic creativity burst forth in his famed Para-
dise Garden up in northwest Georgia, where
Finster showed that one (at least he) could make
art out of the fusion of imagination and what
could be found in the county dump, although
he ascribed his process to God. And Finster
was a singer, a rough-and-ready banjo-picker, a
songsmith, and a poet — actually one of the finer
American vernacular voices . Another change in
Michael’s respect for regional traditional music
came when Brant Slay, a mutual friend, played
for him a recording 1 had made of Cecil Barfield,
a South Georgia bluesman. First recorded by
George Mitchell, Barfield never attained great
fame or traveled far beyond his tenant shack,
although his intensity has been compared to the
best Delta bluesmen. I don’t know that Barfield
directly influenced R.E.M., but as Ezra Pound

- 90 -

ATHENS X ATHENS

said, “artists are the antennae of the race,” and
antennae do connect with one another.

DOC RND LUCY HRD been my Erst con-
nection to the enduring traditions of African-
American music in the Athens area. Shortly
after my arrival in town, a young white guitar
finger-picker named BiU Giles told me 1 needed
to meet Doc, who played “the old style.” That
he did, and the wiry, earnest septuagenarian
and his ever- amused wife and singing partner,
Lucy, introduced me and my wife, Margo — who
photographed the musicians 1 was meeting and
recording — to many African-American singers
of sacred music, some players and singers of
blues and pre-blues music, and some who ac-
cepted both. (Fiddler/guitarist Joe Rakestraw
had performed in string bands with his broth-
ers at country dances on Saturday nights and
played spirituals on Sunday — this was all right
with his father, he said, as long as he didn’t
pat his foot.)

The Barneses took us not only to services
but to singings at African-American churches,
where we were always welcomed, often told,
“Our church doors swing on welcome hinges.”
At these singings, groups or choirs from many
churches could come by and offer two selec-
tions of their own; this gave us the opportunity
to hear practitioners of myriad styles, from
modem gospel to very old antebellum spiri-

“Old Deacon in Church, Winterville, Georgia” (1977).
Photograph by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum

tual and hymn singing. The Brown’s
Chapel Choir of Bishop was a pow-
erful proponent of the latter tradi-
tion. Another was Doc and Lucy’s
group, the W B. Thomas Gospel
Chorus of the Macedonia Baptist
Church in Athens. If one’s idea of
an African-American church choir
resembles a large group of gowned
singers swaying from side to side
together as they sing, neither the
Brown’s Chapel Choir nor the Gos-
pel Chorus conform.

Doc and Lucy’s group consisted of
one man and four women, who sang
old sphituals in an a cappella style
harking back to pre-Emancipation
days. They accepted Doc’s rhyth-
mic guitar for some songs, but their
strength was in forging a unity from
the individuality of each singer: the
oldest. Sister Naomi Bradford, had a
voice that soared like a swallow and
her presence, with her flowing white
hair, anchored the group; Doc’s sis-
ter, Clyde Gilmore, stood stolid and
sang almost to herself ; Mavis Moon was a rock
of endurance in voice and presence; and Lucy
chuckled at the diverse approaches of her fellow
singers, even as her voice gave a sweet continu-
ity to the singing. Their repertoires were vast:
in a side table Doc kept a notebook in which
he had written the titles of several hundred

sacred songs he and Lucy could sing. A verse
of just one of them:

I met my elder this mornin '

Goin ’ up the hill so soon.

Got to make heaven in due time

Before the heaven door close.

I say, wake me, Lord, shake me Lord!

Don ’t let me sleep too late.

Get up early in the mornin ’

Gonna swing on the golden gate.

Yes, and there was worldly music, too, in
the black community of Athens, music that,
like Terrell’s work songs and Rakestraw’s blues
and frohc fiddling, harked back to earher times.
Most of this could only be found in homes,
back porches, and house parties and dances.
There was some commercial entertainment,
notably at the Morton Theatre. Established in
1910, and still in use today, the Morton was
the only venue in town for black professional
entertainers, among them early bluesmen
Roy Dunn, Curley Weaver, and Blind Willie
McTell. Very few Athenians were among the
performers whose talents were tapped by early
commercial recording companies, but this was
happenstance rather than merit. 1 was told by a
retired down-home musician, William Arthur
Lumpkin, that there were, in the 1920s, more
than thirty excellent local black musicians in
Athens and environs who played fiddle, > >

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AxA

banjo, guitar, twelve-string
guitar, and more, who could be
called on to play in Juke joints
and at fish-fries and frolics.

One old-style musician who
was still in his prime when we
met him was the blues harp
player and singer Neal Pattman.

He had lost an arm in a boyhood
farm accident, but could bend
notes on his harmonica as well
as any two-armed player. His
music was strictly local in his
early years, at country gather-
ings and at a juke joint he ran in
“the bottoms” near the railroad
station. Late in life, he was rec-
ognized as a fine performer of
pre-blues traditional pieces like
“John Henry” and “Lost John,” as well as rural
and, later, urban blues, and even sacred music.
In 1980, he was invited to play at the Smithso-
nian Folklife Festival and toured in Europe. I
treasure the memory of going to the Winnipeg
Folk Festival with Neal, two young white mu-
sicians, Brant Slay and Ben Reynolds — whose
“swamp rock” duo was called the Chickasaw
Mudd Puppies — and Precious Bryant, a South
Georgia blueswoman of Neal’s generation. I
suggested a set called “Georgia House Party.”
We had never all played together. We started
with a sound check, which moved seamlessly
into a stream of songs, tunes, blues, and played
for an hour. We had the time of our lives, and
the audience seemed pleased as well.

Shortly after I met the Barneses, Doc said
that I should meet Jim and Mae Wills. Jim, who
could play “anything with strings on it,” had
worked in the cotton mills with Doc, and the
couples were friends and played music together.
Knowing that black and white music forms had
mingled and cross-pollinated for generations in
Southern music, I was not surprised to learn
that the Willses were white. And Neal Pattman
had not only swapped tunes and licks with the
Chickasaw Mudd Puppies but he had a band of
admiring white sidemen in his later-life gigs.
These instances of black and white musical
friendships and interchanges in one community
are not exceptional but typical in the South,
over decades, even centuries. W'hites learned
banjo culture from blacks; blacks took up the
European fiddle; blacks adapted white hymno-
dy to their church culture; in the cotton ports,
black banjo songs morphed into stevedore and
sea chanteys; and blues early on crossed racial
lines — the examples are endless.

THE OLDER BLOCK SECULAR music
has, in Athens as elsewhere, been largely su-
perseded by new forms of blues and rap. Doc
and Lucy’s nephew, Mickey Gilmore, still
blows a little bit of blues harp, but the days
when musicians like Joe Peelin blew his quills
on Broad Street and Fred Shears would play
old-time guitar rags as his dogs danced on Hot
Comer are long gone. Some traditional African-
American churches maintain the traditions of
lined-out hymns and old-fashioned spiritu-
als. And Rev. WiUie Mae Eberhart still beats
time on her tambourine to her intense singing
of gospel songs and jubilees in her Sanctified
church, even as she misses the rolling piano of
her late friend. Mother Fleeta Mitchell. Fleeta,
and her husband. Rev. Nathaniel Mitchell, were
also close friends and singing companions of
Doc and Lucy in the milieu of Athens black
religious singing that I was fortunate to en-
counter and record .Fleeta and N athaniel met in
the 1920s at the Georgia Academy for the Blind
in Macon, where two of their classmates were
Pearly Brown (later Reverend Pearly Brown)
and Blind Willie McTell. A charming vignette
from those years that Mother Mitchell shared
with me : she played the part of Little Red Rid-
ing Hood in a school play, and Willie McTell
played the wood-chopper who saved her from
the Big Bad Wolf. In later years, after a period
of fame as an early blues and spiritual recording
artist, McTell would visit Athens and play at
church with his old schoolmates. That would
have been something to hear!

Athens, Georgia, is still a music town; as
for the local vernacular music, most has faded
away. There are fine younger musicians who
play Irish music and sing sea chanteys at the > >

MICHELLE

GILZENRAT

DAVIS

(FORMER MUSIC EDITOR
OF FLAGPOLE MAGAZINE)

I t’s inevitable: if you live in Athens
long enough, you’ll end up in a band.
For me it took ten years and an invita-
tion to play in an annual event called
Athens Business Rocks. The premise is
simple: form a band with your coworkers
and play a short set of covers in a battle
of the bands at the 40 Watt. Fans “vote”
with their dollars, and proceeds benefit
Null’s Space, an invaluable nonprofit that
provides mental health care and other es-
sential resources for musicians in town.

Despite years of reporting on the local
music scene, I had never actively partici-
pated in it. My guitar shredding was re-
served for the bedroom, and any ambition
to perform before an audience had long
since been abandoned. As it turned out, I
wasn’t the only one in town suppressing
rock star aspirations. I’ve seen teachers,
doctors, mechanics, bankers, engineers,
and caterers make their rock club debuts
at ABR, and they absolutely kill it. I’m
talking about technical skill, showman-
ship, and stage presence — the whole
package. I don’t know any other town
this small that could pull this off, to be
so replete with talent and so eager to give
novices like me a chance.

And what’s more, jamming with your
coworkers does wonders for morale.
Preparing for our debut as the McCom-
munists (named in honor of Flagpole's
lefty editor, Pete McCommons) brought
the entire staff together. Advertising reps
spent their lunch breaks crafting stage
props; editorial meetings turned into
jam sessions. I am forever grateful for the
chance to feel the warmth and energy
of performing a sold-out show at the 40
Watt, and I like to think that our paper
became better for it, too.

Illustration of Doc & Lucy Barnes by Art Rosenbaum

ATHENS X ATHENS

- 93 -

Globe pub, and lots of string band and blues
enthusiasts among the students and townies.
The North Georgia Folk Festival had its thirty-
first year at Sandy Creek Park in 2015. The
present-day Skillet Tickers performed at the
festival in 2014, but most of the old-timers of
the region who shared the stage with younger
musicians are gone: banjo-pickers W Guy Bruce
and Mabel Cawthorn, the Ellers from Towns
County, the Mitchells, Joe Rakestraw, Neal
Pattman, Doc and Lucy.

A few strands of tradition remain, some in
the old-time churches, some strictly within
family circles, with folks who treasure songs
passed down from earlier generations. 1 know
that the late Dr. Ben Barrow s daughters, Betty
and Nancy, will continue to love and sing the
ditties they learned as girls from their father,
as they rode around with him on house calls.
One is “Mammy Black Cat” :

If I had a thousand bricks I’d build my
chimney higher

To keep old mammy black cat from jumping
in the fire.

And lay ten dollars down, and count them
one by one.

And lay ten dollars down, and count them
two by two.

Occasionally Bill Presley will show up at
the J & J Flea Market north of Athens, offer-
ing novelty instruments of his own inven-
tion, like the “pan-jo,” an aluminum frying
pan with five banjo strings running over the
back along an accurately fretted hand-carved
neck; flip it over, and Bill has painted realistic
eggs and bacon on the inside. He grew up in a
sharecropping family, and plays a “real” guitar
and sings old ballads like “John Riley” and
new songs of his own composition like “The
Flea Market Blues.” He is white, and his hero
is Martin Luther King Jr.; his family detested
the Ku Klux Klan.

As 1 write, I look forward to hearing moun-
tain singers Bonnie Loggins and Mary Lomax,
down from Habersham County. Octogenarian
Mary might sing one of the many old British
ballads she knows, and if she’s up to it, her
nonagenarian sister, Bonnie, will sing a song
her father, Lemuel Payne, bom in 1884, had
sung to her:

I’ll drink and be jolly and pass away folly.

I’ll drink it away in a bottle of wine.

I’ll drink it away in full flowing bumper.

I’ll play on my fiddle and pass away time, "if

ATHENS POTLUCK;

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY JASON THRASHER

T he series Athens Potluck is focused
on the wildly diverse music scene
of Athens, Georgia. Jason Thrash-
er selected the first musician for the

series, Laura Carter of Elf Power and
the Orange Twin collective, then photographed her and asked her five questions. Laura
selected W Cullen Hart, of Olivia Tremor Control (whose studio is pictured here), and
posed her questions to him. Hart chose Julian Koster of Neutral Milk Hotel, and so on.
Thrasher photographs each musician at home. Their answers to the questions are dis-
played on vinyl records, album covers, books, and in works of art.

-BETH HALL THRASHER

Athens Potluck is on view at the
Georgia Theatre in downtown Athens.

PHELAN LAVELLE

(SHADE; CRUNCHY)

I was in a band called Bird Names in Chicago and a dude of some renown in Athens
had taken a shine to our particular melee of weird crap-pop. He invited us on tour
with one of his many projects, Quiet Hooves, a band that seemed to hold an insu-
lar, specific celebrity in Athens — when 1 mention them now, only a few years later,
people either wet their pants like fanatics or have not a clue as to who they were. So
we hit the road together, sharing vans, old Peavey equipment, inside jokes, and a vari-
ety of cigs and snacks. Naturally, they booked a show in Athens. Coming into Quiet
Hooves’ hometown with them was like when you have a burn and it gets close to heat,
the throb of proximity to the mothership. 1 moved here within a year.

- 94 -

ATHENS X ATHENS

AxA

THE

C OS-MO -I>OL-I-TAN’
SOUND

VIC CHESNUTT, THE GREATEST

Patterson Hood

I moved to Athens on April Fools’ Day, 1994.
By then, I had been writing songs and more
or less living a life obsessed with music
for about twenty years. Based on just one
afternoon and evening spent there, I felt this
place calling to me. Starting in the early eight-
ies, the town had built a reputation as a mecca
for bands and, for better or worse, had helped
formulate the “alternative” genre. SPIN and
Rolling Stone had written up the Athens scene,
and someone even made a movie about it. R.E.M.
was the biggest band in the world. But by the

time 1 landed there, to most outsiders Athens’s
glory days were already in the rearview mirror
and the hype and media attention had moved on
to other “scene towns” like Seattle and Chapel
Hill. It was their loss. As I immediately discov-
ered, Athens in the nineties was a vibrant and
amazing place of gigantic artistic diversity — in a
town of fewer than 1 00 ,000 there were probably
more than three-hundred bands, making a wide
range of different types of music, and doing a
lot of it very well.

A local songwriter named Jack Logan > >

SARA CAMPBELL

(L. A. -BASED WRITER)

I t’s 1996. My friend and I are sling-
ing down Pabsts and watching
Fred Schneider speak-sing to a few
dozen amused onlookers at the 40
Watt. Bored and looking for some-
thing to do, we’d read in Flagpole that
he was stopping in Athens on the
tour supporting his new solo record.
Just Fred.

I hadn’t been to the 40 Watt many
times, though I’d heard tales. Secret
R.E.M. shows performed under
preposterous pseudonyms. Southern
Culture on the Skids throwing buck-
ets of fried chicken at the audience. A
Man or Astro-Man? show where the
entire crowd sported alien costumes.
All great fun, but intimidating to a
nineteen-year-old who was fresh out
of the dorms by way of suburbia.

Just Fred was produced by Steve
Albini, and it bore all the grunge
flourishes you’d expect from his
mid-nineties output, thrown over
the unmistakable Fred-ness of Fred.
Though I’d never seen him live, he
managed to eclipse every expectation
of outre performance, flamboyant
dress, and Dionysian flourish I could
have imagined. Was the show tran-
scendent? Not exactly. Memorable?
Oh yes.

What I hadn’t yet realized about
Athens is one of the key markers
of its brilliance — that night, no one
seemed out of place. B-52’s groupies.
Fred Schneider appreciators. Townies
and friends of the band. Rednecks.
Randoms looking for a dark place
to drink and drown out the noise in
their heads. And us, lowly under-
grads, barely half-formed and guided
only by our need to be a part of the
night, trying different scenes and
sounds on for size.

Photograph of Vic Chesnutthy Jem Cohen

ATHENS X ATHENS

- 95 -

JUSTIN GAGE

(AQUARIUM DRUNKARD)

P rior to my buying into the heathen
bargain that is Los Angeles, I grew
up in a wooded suburb of Atlanta
about sixty miles from Athens. It was
there, when I was a kid in the eighties,
that the myth and magic of the Classic
City began to take hold. The town had
lore. The kind that was passed down
from friends’ older brothers home on
holiday breaks. A lore imbued via their
stories and cassettes filled with mixes of
bands I’d never heard of: R.E.M. playing
house parties in Normaltown; the old
40 Watt. It seemed inclusive, yet exotic,
close and very far away. Pylon, Love Trac-
tor, Squalls, Flat Duo Jets, the B-52’s.

By the time 1 was sixteen, in the
early nineties, Athens felt like a mecca,
even more so after my friends and 1
began making the trek to see shows on
weekends, crashing on couches, and
drinking underage where we could
(usually Sky’s Place, RIP).

I moved to Athens in 1995 under the
guise of attending school. My real inten-
tion was to take in as much music and
associated ephemera as possible. And
there was a lot of it, and plenty of spaces
to find it. Vic Chesnutt, the Elephant
6 Collective, Bloodkin, the Star Room
Boys, Five Eight, Macha, Hayride, Panic,
DBT. All were active. Six months into
my residency, 1 found a job at a record
store downtown. In hindsight, that gig,
in that town, formed my musical tastes
and DNA.

It’s presently 97 degrees in Los An-
geles — in mid-October — and all I can
think about are the leaves falling in Nor-
maltown on Prince in front of the Grit.
And damn, don’t 1 miss it.

released an album called Bulk with more than
forty songs on it, each like a short story, to criti-
cal acclaim. The band Five Eight seemed to be
on the verge of breaking through to worldwide
recognition. Meanwhile, Athens musicians like
Ben Mize and David Barbe were touring inter-
nationally as part of major bands like Count-
ing Crows and Sugar. Around town. Bill Doss,
Andrew Rieger, Jeff Mangum, and a collective
of other like-minded artists were collaborating
in bands like Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power,
and Neutral Milk Hotel. Before long they cre-
ated a scene unto itself known worldwide as
Elephant 6.

In the summer ofI995,Itookajobasasound
engineer at a local club called the High Hat,
granting me a bird’s-eye view of many of the best
musicians in town. From my literal perch in the
sound booth overlooking the room, I saw great
live music five nights a week. On nights that 1
wasn’t working, I was out at the 40 Watt Club
or the Atomic or later Tasty World, immersing
myself in the glorious music scene of my adopted
hometown. 1 was broke and living in a dive, but
1 was writing songs nearly every day, laying the
groundwork for the band of my dreams.

It was around that time that I first saw and
heard Vic Chesnutt. I walked into the 40 Watt
not really knowing anything about him or his
music. Upon moving to town, 1 had heard over
and over that 1 needed to see Vic and that he
was “the best songwriter in Athens.” I didn’t
know his work, 1 didn’t know what he looked
like or even that he was in a wheelchair. That
night wiU always go down as one of the most
transcendent hve music experiences of my life.
He came onstage with what he referred to as his
“scared little skiffle band,” rolled up to the front,
and proceeded to sing and play some stunning
songs. There was a naked beauty in his music
that drew me in and tore me apart. 1 ended up
on the front row with my mouth agape and tears
streaming down my face.

I’VE OFTEN SRID THAT VicChesnutt
was the best songwriter of my generation; some-
day there will be classes at fine colleges devoted
to the study of his songs. I realize that the “best
of” declaration can be a turnoff and that I sound

hke a snake oil salesman claiming his craft makes
one feel more alive. Added to the relative ob-
scurity of Vic’s life’s work, such proselytizing
could be taken as elitist drivel. That is, if the
subject were not of such awe-inspiring talent
in an unlikely package.

Vic Chesnutt is not a household name. He had
a small following at the height of his acclaim.
His music would be considered an acquired
taste, even at its most accessible, and he was so
prolific that it’s daunting to explore his large
number of releases. He simply released more
music than people could keep up with, solo and
in collaboration with others, often on small (and
sometimes now-defunct) labels.

Vic’s writing was so free. He would make
choruses and hooks out of things most people
would never think to fit into the song form.
His art was all encompassing, freely mixing the
high- and lowbrow, the beautiful and profane.
He could use his Southern drawl to make short
words long and fit the most complex of thoughts
into an almost childlike melody. From “Onion
Soup”: Those were the days, when you were so
cos-mo-poTi-tan / These are the days, my letters
they ’re increasingly maudlin. Vic was willing and
able to rhyme “A hotel full of Pakistanis” and “a
front porch filled with greasy, greasy grannies . ”
For me, it was love at first sight.

In “Soft Picasso,” one of my all-time favorite
songs, he told the tale of a friend’s comeuppance
upon the realization that the sexual revolution
could work both ways. The twists and turns
of the verses are followed by a knockout left
hook of a chorus punch line, all delivered with
Vic’s deadpan drawl and a deceptively complex
melody. It’s not his best song, but it’s better than
nearly anyone else’s best song.

What is Vic’s best song? That’s a tough one. It
could be “Isadora Duncan, ” the stunning opener
to his debut album. Little. An ace card to open
any hand, it’s a near-perfect gem of a song with
a vicious central hne : I can ’t believe you own this
attitude. Or it could be another from the same
album, “Speed Racer,” wherein he lays bare his
injury and defiant outlook:

Tm not a victim.

I’m not a victim.

I am an atheist.

I am an atheist.

The idea of divine order is essentially crazy.

Laws of action and reaction are the closest
thing to truth in the universe.

Reconciling this earned worldview with the
one he inherited growing up in the Bible Belt > >

- 9G -

ATHENS X ATHENS

Who comes to
the Sewanee_S.c.hool
of Letters?

I Bonnie ™

singer, songwriter, storyteller

foure a touring singer-songwriter, a “road dog” who’s been traveling constantly since 2002.
.Then one of your songs is recorded by your musical hero, is named “Song of the Year” by
The New York Times, and wins a Grammy. Another one is featured on the hit TV show Nashville,
and now legendary producer Dave Cobb is ready to go to work on your next album.

What do you do next?

If you’re Bonnie Bishop , after you’ve caught your breath, collected your Grammy, and thanked
Bonnie Raitt for recording “Not Cause I Wanted To,” you start earning your MFA in Creative
Nonfiction at the Sewanee School of Letters. It’s the innovative, summers -only graduate program
in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of the South, where Bonnie is pursuing what
she has always seen as her real vocation. “Most people know me as just a singer-songwriter,” she
explains, “but the truth is I’ve always been a storyteller, with or without my guitar. After 13 years on
the road, I feel the need to get back to the heart of my creativity.”

If you have stories that need telling, take a look at the School of Letters, with its programs in poetry,
fiction, and creative nonfiction. You can catch your breath later.

o

o

o

••

' letters.sewanee.edu

931.598.1636 • The University of the South • 735 University Ave. ’ Sewanee, TN 37383 • photo hj Gordon Might

INDEPENDENT LISTINGS

FOLK POTTERY MUSEUM

Learn the stories of men
and women who shaped
the earth and water of this
region into once-essential
household items now
valued and collected as
distinctive folk art.

Well known for its
tradition of folk pottery,
northeast Georgia is
home to such noted potter
families as Meaders,
Hewell, Dorsey, and
Ferguson.

The museum is part of the Sautee Nacoochee Center.
283 Georgia Hwy 255 N
Sautee-Nacoochee, GA | (706) 878-3300

www.folkpotterymuseum.com

The Allman Brothers Band
Classic Memorabilia, 1969-1976

by Willie Perkins and Jack Weston

Filled with more than
two hundred captioned
images, this new
4-color book chronicles
memorabilia of the
iconic band during their
early performing and
recording years in
Macon, Georgia. Weston
and Perkins discuss
in detail the various
' categories and aspects

of band collectibles from the period. Galadrielle
Allman, daughter of the late Duane Allman, offers an
intimate introduction.

Mercer University Press
$25 paperback | 9780881465471

www.mupress.org

biG E^re

The internationally acclaimed Big Ears Festival-
declared “the most ambitious avant-garde festival to
emerge in America in more than decade” hy Rolling
5tone— hosts its most expansive, groundbreaking
lineup to date, bringing together musical leaders
and innovators from the worlds of classical, j azz,
electronic, folk, hip-hop and beyond for the weekend
of March 31 - April 2, 2016, in venues throughout
downtown Knoxville, TN. Featuring composer-in-
residence John Luther Adams, Laurie Anderson,
Philip Glass, Andrew Bird, Anthony Braxton, Yo
La Tengo, and more. Big Ears offers dozens of
concerts by a virtual who’s who of the world’s most
iconoclastic and visionary music artists.

Weekend passes and daily tickets are on sale
now at www.BigEarsFestival.com

ARTIST RETREAT

The Lillian E. Smith Center of
Piedmont College serves as an artist
retreat and educational facility in
Clayton, Georgia. Applications are
accepted year-round. Weekend
retreats are also available.

PI

Find out more at
piedmont.edu/lillian-smlth-center

Postmark Bayou Chene: a novel

by Gwen Roland

“Postmark Bayou Chene
is a lyrical tour through
a place and culture
swallowed by time
but, in Gwen Roland’s
keenly observant
telling, brought back
to life and rendered
unforgettable. The
voices, characters,
language, landscapes,
cadence of life— Roland
knows her swamp and
her swamp people, and
readers will feel lucky to know them, too.”
—Ken Wells, author of Meely LaBauve

$29.95 hardcover | www.lsupress.org

SCOLUMBUS

MUSEUM

4tlw(i)\ rhan^tiff. always firr.

p. STMARK
BAYOU
CHENE

GWEN ROLAND

Enjoy American art and history in one place!

Don’t miss your chance to learn about
acclaimed musicians Ma Rainey and
Blind Tom in exhibitions on view
now at the Museum.

Admission is free.

Bring your friends and family.

Columbus Museum
706.748.2562
1251 Wynnton Road
Columbus, GA 3 1 906
www.columbusmuseum.com

came at a high emotional, and sometimes physi-
cal, price. There is a moment in Peter Sillen’s
wonderful 1994 documentary short film. Speed
Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt, in
which the poet John Seawright recounts seeing
Vic perform at a Unitarian church with Vic’s
family in attendance. After singing the lines
above, John says, Vic apologized to them all,
but especially to his granny. It is a heartbreaking
story of Vic’s conviction but also his kindness.

Vic was raised in a Christian home in Zebu-
Ion, Georgia. He was adopted by loving parents.
His father, James, worked as a luggage handler
for Eastern Airlines and his mother, Marian,
was a clerk at the immigration office in Atlanta.
Vic was very close to his grandparents. The
colloquialisms in his wordplay could likely
be traced back to all the time spent with old
Georgian men and women. There is no doubt
he spent many hours as a child going to church.
But instead of discovering himself there, he
began to find his place in the world by playing
music. Vic dabbled in songwriting and played
guitar in various bands before the car crash that,
at eighteen, left him mostly paralyzed from the
neck down with only partial use of his arms
and hands.

After the wreck he initially couldn’t play the
guitar so he threw himself into his songwriting.
He was influenced by the poetry of Wallace
Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman,
and Stevie Smith. Vic turned inward with a
vengeance and reinvented himself. He made his
disability a platform from which to provoke and
taunt, to rail against hypocrisy and complacency.

A few years later — while tripping on acid, he
claimed — he discovered a way to once again play
the guitar. He glued a pick to a special glove he
rigged up for his right hand that enabled him
to strum, while special tunings allowed him to
make simple chords with his left. His instinct
for music technique was undiminished, so he
persevered, making up for his physical limita-
tions by drawing on his vast chordal knowledge.

After moving to Athens in 1985, Vic was
discovered playing solo at the 40 Watt Club
by Michael Stipe, who produced his first two
albums. After that, he made some fifteen more,
including collaborations with such varied enti-
ties as Widespread Panic, Elf Power, Thee Silver
Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Van Dyke Parks,
Guy Picciotto, Ham 1 , Jonathan Richman, and
Lambchop. In 1990, he married Tina Whatley.
She was a devoted companion as well as musical
collaborator.

On record, he pursued a restless fervor with
a lack of compromise to the varying fashions of

- 98 -

ATHENS X ATHENS

the day. Onstage he could be fearless and antago-
nistic, sometimes gloriously great and sometimes
train- wreck terrible — but never boring. (Vic with
a nylon string guitar is punk-rock incarnate.) The
one constant above all else was the top-shelf qual-
ity of the songwriting.

Talk about playing it like you feel it — for him,
every chord or note was an agonizingly painful
and herculean act. Getting around was no small
task either. Just playing locally had to be a feat of
triumph over adversity, but Vic was a road-dog till
the end, logging tour after tour aU over the world,
navigating airports and venues in a schedule that
even I would find grueling.

I FIRST MET VIC shortly after that tran-
scendent experience in his audience at the 40
Watt, during my tenure at the High Hat, where
I had the good fortune of working several of his
shows, including the memorable album-release
night for About to Choke. He came onstage and
basically disavowed the album he was there to
promote.

A year or so later, I mixed a show for Brute
(wherein Vic was backed by the Athens band
Widespread Panic), which culminated with a com-
pletely irony-free cover of Olivia Newton-John’s
“HaveTbuNeverBeenMellow.” Itwas soul sing-
ing at its finest, with Vic so taken by the moment
that he seemed to be levitating above his wheel-
chair. I was standing in the booth grinning from
ear to ear during a song that I had always hated.

It was some years later when I got to know Vic
better and our friendship was forged. We were
both booked to play a Christmas benefit that Jay
Farrar was putting on in St. Louis. The plan was for
Vic and me to be on the same flight from Atlanta.
I would rent a car and he would ride with me from
airport to hotel, from hotel to show. Vic seemed
embarrassed for me to be helping him, but I was
honored. There was snow on the ground and it
had never occurred to me how treacherous even
a small amount could be for a paraplegic, lest he
get frostbite and not immediately know it. Vic
didn’t drink anymore but loved to smoke a joint
or two. I procured a small amount and after the
show several of us had a wonderful late night hang
at the hotel, listening to Pink Floyd’s Animals on
repeat on an iPod dock and laughing hysterically
as Vic held court.

Vic’s voice was an instrument in itself. Not
beautiful in the traditional or technical sense, it
was highly expressive, the perfect vehicle for the
songs he wrote. His songs had a conversational
quality about them that I have always aimed for in
my own writing, and at the same time his speaking
voice had a sing-song quality about it that was > >

BOB SLEPPY

(NUgi'S SPACE)

I t was a few minutes before 9:00 on a Monday morning when I heard a knock on the
front door at Nugi’s Space. We typically don’t open until after ten, and musicians
rarely arrive before noon to rehearse. 1 casually left my desk and walked to the front
door to find a familiar face standing outside on the patio. “%u’re here early,” 1 said,
welcoming the young man into the building. He replied, “My roommate Just left the
house and 1 didn’t want to be alone.” We made our way back to my desk, where I share
an open office with my coworkers, and one of them asked the man how he was doing
that morning. “Not so good,” he said timidly. “1 Just need to be around other people
right now.” Without any hesitation, my coworker offered to sit with him on the big
overstuffed couch in the common area.

N u(;i Phillips arrived in Athens in 1992
to finish his undergraduate degree. A
talented guitarist and songwriter, he
quickly became immersed in the local music
scene. After a couple years, he thought about
recording some of his songs and contacted
engineer and producer David Barbe. They
developed a friendship and planned Null’s first
album.

In November 1996, as his recording work
wound down, Nugi began to feel the presence
of an unwelcome companion. He had been
diagnosed with clinical depression five years
earlier, and despite the loving support of his family, access to high-quality treatment,
and a keen understanding of his illness, he continued to struggle. On Thanksgiving
Day in 1996, while alone in his Athens apartment, Nugi Phillips took his own life.
Within the liner notes of Nu<;i’s posthumously released album. Only When the Right
Side Glows, Barbe described him as “a combination of brilliance and fragility . . .
someone lost in an impermeable zone of release.”

Following her son’s death, Linda Phillips conceived of a place where people —
particularly musicians — in Athens who suffered from mental illnesses could go for
accessible treatment and support. We opened the doors to Nugi’s Space in September
2000. Our top priority is to create and maintain a safe, stable, and supportive
environment to promote the emotional, physical, and professional well-being of
Athens’s musicians. We offer access to healthcare services, and our building has four
soundproof practice rooms and a common area with a raised stage for performances.
In the summer, we host a day camp for kids that includes both professional
music instruction and self-esteem training. Since its inception, Nucji’s Space has
provided access to mental health services for almost two thousand musicians in our
community and subsidized more than twenty-five-thousand appointments with
mental health professionals.

T hroughout the day, 1 checked in on the young man at the Space. I saw him

quietly read a book or listen to music on his headphones, or engage the staff in
conversation. I even saw him welcome guests. Compared to Just a few hours
earlier, he seemed comfortable and at peace. We knew that the fire burning inside his
mind was still present, but he was able to control it for another day. As the day came
to an end, the man walked back to the office to say good-bye and offer his sincere
thanks. Someone said, “%u’re volunteering here tomorrow, right?” The man cracked
a smile. “Teah, I’ll be here,” he said. “I’ll definitely be here.”

ATHENS X ATHENS

- 99 -

distinctly musical when he spoke. As John Jer-
emiah Sullivan wrote of Vic in this magazine in
1997, “Maybe not since Dylan Thomas dropped
dead of an insult to the brain has anyone squeezed
so much meaning out of the sound of Enghsh. ”

My band shared a bill with him once at a
crowded showcase at South by Southwest. The
show was a disorganized mess, with too many
bands sharing too small a stage, along with the
usual technical difficulties associated with such
things. I can remember Vic working through
a particularly long soundcheck. At one point,
the soundman asked him if he was happy. “Tm
not happy,” Vic sardonically replied without
skipping a beat. “But it sounds all right.”

It’s well known that Vic attempted suicide
several times ; even his car wreck was shrouded
in some speculation about intent. He was open
and candid about his struggles with depression,
which fueled much of his work, the same way
his inspirational defiance did in his better times.
He referred to the song “Flirted with Tbu AU My
Life” — another candidate for his very best — as
his breakup song with suicide. That it appeared
on his final album is perhaps ironic, or perhaps
not. To know and love Vic was to accept him as
he was, as he was always militantly his own man.

On Christmas morning, 2009, Vic Chesnutt
passed away from an overdose of muscle re-
laxants. His loss tore the heart out of so many
people in our shared town. At home, my wife
and 1 worked hard to conceal our sadness from
our four-year-old daughter. After she opened
her presents, 1 took a brief opportunity to slip
away into a back room to write a song to try and
deal with my overflowing emotions. “Sitting
in the Sunshine (Thinking About the Rain)”
is so far unrecorded, but it enabled me to get
through that day. Perhaps that unto itself is a
fitting tribute to an artist whose songwriting
enabled him to live for so long.

A few weeks after Vic’s passing, many of his
favorite artists gathered at the 40 Watt Club
to pay tribute. I witnessed two unsurpassed
evenings of beautiful music, mostly Vic’s songs,
lovingly performed by a wide range of artists,
local and otherwise, for a packed house.

Later, 1 collaborated on another song with
Kelly Hogan. She and Vic were close friends
and one of his last songs had been for the solo
record she was working on. After he died, she
wrote a stream-of-consciousness poem for him
and asked me to help adapt it into a song for
her album. The song took too long to finish to
make her album, so 1 asked her if I could put it
on the record I was working on. “Come Back
Little Star,” which featured a guest vocal by

Kelly, was the standout track on my album Heat
Lightning Rumbles in the Distance. “This town
got blown to tatters / When you traded in your
wheels for wings.”

In the years since Vic’s passing, everyone
who loved him has had to figure out their own
ways to deal with the loss. Some of our friends
say they can’t play his records yet; it just makes
them too sad. For me, it’s been the opposite. 1 will

always mourn that he’s gone and that we can’t go
see him play, or laugh at his beautifully perverse
sense of the world. But we can take solace in
the immense gift he left us. For Vic, a lot of life
must have been a nearly unbearable pain, but
he endured it for so long in order to create these
beautiful works of art and we can still visit him
by playing those wonderful songs — songs that 1
feel make up an afterlife Vic could believe in.

"SITTING IN THE SUNSHINE
(THINKING ABOUT THE RAIN)"

LYRICS BY PATTERSON HOOD. FOR VIC CHESNUTT

I’m not happy hut it sounds all right

Not much that you can do to make my outlook bright

It’s just gonna take a while to chase these blues away

But I appreciate you stopping over anyway

Cuz I always look forward to the things you say

and the way you choose to say them

I’m not defeated I’m just hanging low

You ’ve been sitting here beside me long enough to know

That I always have a surliness to guide me through

and I put my disposition in everything I do

If we cut it into plastic then I promise you

you can be the first to play it

If I’m sitting in the sunshine
I ’ll be thinking about the rain
But I long to have you beside me
Just the same

Not surrendering I’m just too tired to fight

I’m still hungry for a win but lost my appetite

I’m not mistaking your attentions for an easy play

Not forsaking all those mentions that you ’ve brought my way

And a laugh to cut the tensions of this winter day

and the nights that always follow

If I’m parked out in your driveway
Will you leave your porch light on
This empty seat beside me
Needs you on it

I’m not happy don ’t guess I ever was
But I’ve made the most of something that just never was
And I gave the darker moments one bell of a chase
And I’ve kept a sense of humor through my darkest days
We pretend that it’s not ending, just some passing phase
Like the light that’s passing through it

Sitting in the sunshine, thinking about the rain
I long to have you beside me
Just the same

oo- ATHENS X ATHENS

ORT BY JASON THRASHER

W illiam Orten Carlton, aka Ort, is perhaps best known for his role as storyteller
in the 1987 documentary Athens, GA: Inside/ Out. Ort can also be found
occasionally spinning oldies on WUOG (90.5 FM) and serving as special
correspondent on craft beer and obscure 45s for Flagpole Magazine. When Ort recently
got into trouble with the city for his overabundant “outdoor collection,” the Athens
community rallied with an online auction of the photograph pictured here and raised
enough money to sort through Ort s things and pay his fines. After the ordeal, Ort
remarked that he was relieved to find a few great records he’d been missing for decades.
-BETH HALL THRASHER

CINDY

WILSON

(B-52'S)

THAYER

SARRANO

(SINGER/SONGWRITER)

I t’s summertime. I am in the sound
booth at Nugi’s Space watching the
annual Camp Amped Grand Finale,
the final performance at the rock camp
for teens where 1 work as a counselor.

It feels like the whole town has packed
in for the show: proud families;
club owners; Athens musicians who
are young, seasoned, jaded. Every
generation is watching the stage. And
the campers are killing it! One camper
who was painfully shy on her first day
is now taking a solo, belting “Freedom!”
from Aretha Franklin’s “Think.” The
campers close with the Beastie Boys’
“Sabotage,” tripping out with delay
and strobe lights, and I see the Georgia
Theatre’s soundman and lighting
designer high five each other after the
song’s epic ending. These guys have
taken off on a Saturday night, donated
their time and talents, and helped make
this rock moment. There is so much
generosity, no pretension. While nights
like these are not uncommon here, we
do not take them for granted.

W e played our
first show
at Julia and
Grey’s house on Val-
entine’s Day in 1977, but we only had about four
or five songs so we had to repeat the set. Before the
party, Kate went out and bought us both these big
white wigs — there were matching pocketbooks that
came with them. We were just having fun, so we
wore that. And when we came on that night, people
were so into it, everything totally clicked. Everybody
was dancing. The party was in this old house, and
the floors were bouncing up and down and the whole
house was shaking from the dancing. I met my future
husband that night. I started my career and I met my
husband at the same party. It was totally crazy.

The B 52’s first show. Photo by Kelly Bugdeii

ATHENS X ATHENS

lo

AxA

“I OOTTA.
MOVE HERE.

WE SHOULD START A BAND
AND DO THIS."

MICHAEL LACHOWSKI is a founding member
of the seminal art-rock band Pylon, formed
in Athens in 1978. GRAHAM ULICNY is the
front man for contemporary Athens band Rep-
tar, formed in 2009. In August, Michael called
Graham to talk about the evolution of the city’s
music scene.

MICHAEL: The most interesting thing to me is
that both of our bands were kind of “it bands”
representing Athens and, therefore, ambas-
sadors for Athens. For us, it was just a total
shock that we could’ve come from a small town
in Georgia. Because back then, there wasn’t
much of that except the B-52’s.

GRAHAM: Bythe time we were on tour, we had
people coming to our shows because we were
from Athens. That has everything to do with
when y ’aU were playing, starting the scene that
y’aU started. %u know, it’s just a tiny town. Most
people have never been there. But now people
have heard the records, so there’s an expectation.

MICHAEL: Well, Pylon still had some of that,
even though there was only one band that came
before us, and they’d already left Athens by
the time we formed. When we went places,
our little card of introduction was basically
one or two phone calls by somebody in the
B-52’s. And then it was just zip, zip, zip — real
easy to get people in New York, Boston, and
Philadelphia to book us. But the fact that we
were from Athens never ceased to be an amaz-
ing talking point.

GRAHAM: When we first went on tour and
we’d do interviews, the first question was usu-
ally, “Whatisitevenlike?” Because I think it’s
hard to imagine. Before I moved to Athens I had
that same idea: there’s all of this disparate, amaz-
ing music emanating from this weird little city
in Georgia. It’s really cool to have that. If you’re
a band from New York or something, you can’t
claim that.

MICHAEL: We definitely got asked all kinds of
questions like: “How could this be happening?
What is in the water?”

GRAHAM: The first show I saw there was Ku-
roma playing a house show in a purple house
over by the train tracks. People were going in-
sane and dancing. And it was nasty and weird —
almost a haunted house-looking zone — and I
was just like, “I gotta move here. We should
start a band and do this.”

MICHAEL: How do you feel about the music
scene in Athens right now?

GRAHAM: It’s way more interesting and way
more vital than it was when we were first play-
ing. There’s so much diversity now. There’s so
much good music, it’s wild. A lot of folks who
make it to Athens — especially if they’re going
to school there and grew up in a super-boring
suburb of Atlanta — more than likely come and
just have fun. They find a place where they can
express themselves.

MICHAEL: I’ve been worrying that there have
been too many changes in Athens — the fertility
of super-creativity for its own sake was harder
and harder to imagine, but it sounds like it’s
happening again.

GRAHAM: Really, there’s this lineage starting
with y’all. Pylon and that group of bands has
become its own institution — people come for
that, I think. Some of my favorite folks there,
and some of my favorite musicians there, defi-
nitely came after living in a bunch of other places
and then settled in Athens. It’s just a good place
to be creative. *if

MICHAEL STIPE

(R.E.M.)

W hat’s important to any ongoing
scene is having venues like
the Go Bar and the Caledonia,
and a yearly festival like Slingshot, that
encourage and support burgeoning local
acts and offer them venues to perform in
and hone their vision and sound.

02 - ATHENS X ATHENS

R.E.M., Athens, Georgia, 1983 © Sandra-Lee Phipps

ATT, DAY. EVERY DAY.

Start your day with a little soul at the iconic H&H restaurant, where Mama Louise, the matriarch of Macon's southern
rock explosion, fed the Allman Brothers and scores of other musicians. For lunch, hit up the Rookery for our renowned
burgers named after famous musicians. For dinner, join us at the critically-acclaimed Dovetail for our unique brand of
crafted cuisine and cocktails - abound with locally sourced ingredients. And for a nightcap, hang the moon with us at
the Cox Capitol Theatre, Macon's favorite concert and events venue.

“Experience history. Create your own.”
The Moonhanger Group | Macon, Georgia

COX CAPITOL

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— LEGENDS —

Prayers
for Richard

BY

DAVID RAMSEY

And there appeared
a great wonder in heaven

• • *

L ittle Richard has always been attuned to
signs. At the height of his fame, on tour
in Australia in October 1957, he saw a
big ball of fire in the sky above the stadium.
This was his second vision of fire. On the flight
over, the glow of the engines appeared to him
as flames and he pictured yellow-haired angels
holding the plane aloft.

The message, to Little Richard, was clear. He
had to leave show business, quit singing the
devil’s music, and get right with God.

“It looked as though the big ball of fire came
directly over the stadium about two or three
hundred feet above our heads,” he later told
his biographer, Charles White. “It shook my

mind I got up from the piano and said, ‘This

is it. I am through. I am leaving show business
to go back to God.’” And he did. He ditched
the tour — leaving half a million dollars’ worth

of canceled bookings, with multiple lawsuits
to come. The change in plans kept him off a
scheduled flight that crashed into the Pacific
Ocean. The Lord wasn’t messing around.

Little Richard quit rock & roll altogether, at
least for a time. He enrolled at Oakwood College
in Huntsville, Alabama, to study to become a
minister. All to the despair of the money men
at Specialty Records — owner Art Rupe said that
Little Richard was so popular they could have
recorded him blowing his nose and made a hit.

What Little Richard saw overhead in Aus-
tralia was in fact Sputnik, the Russian satellite
traveling 18,000 miles an hour in the night sky.

Picture Little Richard , far from home , drenched
in sweat. “He made an impressive entry, ” accord-
ing to Austrahan newspaper the Age, “wearing
a brilliant red coat over a canary yellow suit,
topped off with a bright green turban. But he
discarded all the trimmings until he was left with
only pyj ama pants and the turban. ” Pounding on
the piano and then dancing on top of it and then
throwing his bedazzled clothes into the crowd.
And Richard saw the bright yellow bum of the
satellite, or probably the rocket casing trailing it,
perhaps streaking past the vibrant Alpha and Beta
Centauri stars of the Southern Cross.

A star who mistook a satellite for a ball of fire.
And we might pause here to note that whether
or not it was a message from God, something
like a miracle was afoot. A freaky-deaky bi-
sexual black man who grew up poor in the Jim
Crow South in Macon, Georgia, singing a wild,
sexy nonsense song that changed music forever,
everywhere — even in a packed stadium half-
way around the world, as shrieking Austrahan
teenagers nearly started a riot, scuffling to touch
the man’s discarded clothes. Fire in the heavens
and fire on earth.

There are miracles everywhere if you know
where to look. And know how to listen: A wop-
hop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-hoom!

And the Word was made flesh,
and dwelt among us

L ittle Richard was bom Richard Wayne Pen-
niman in Macon in 1932, the third of twelve
children. His daddy. Bud Penniman, was a church
deacon and a bootlegger and a club owner. God,
sin, and music. Bud met Richard’s mother. Leva
Mae, at a Seventh-day Adventist holy meeting
when she was thirteen. After a year of courtship,
the couple married. Leva Mae meant to name her
third child Ricardo, but there was a mistake on
the birth certificate. “1 never had sus enough to
check it out and make ’em straighten it up right,”
she said. And so he was Richard.

He was born with his right leg shorter than
his left. His limp made him look like he was
sashaying when he walked, and the kids called
him faggot, sissy, freak, punk. He felt more
like a girl than a boy, he said later, and used to
imitate his mother putting powder on her face.

When he was a child, a lady in town put the
“bad-mouth” on Richard, a curse that he would
die at twenty-one. “I always believed that,” he
told his biographer. “But it just made me wilder. ”
Richard’s career as a traveling musician — and
his hfe as a sexually adventurous, gender-bending
wild man — started in his teenage years. He ex-
perimented with men in the gay underworld in
Macon, guys named Madame Oop and Sis Henry
and Bro Boy, as well as with older women.

Illustration of Little Richard by Jim Blanchard

OxfordAmerican.org

05 -

At sixteen, Richard had a falling out with
his father over his sexuality — Bud told him he
was “half a son.” He left home to join a travel-
ing medicine show literally selling snake oil;
he would sing Louis Jordans “Caldonia,” the
only tune he knew that wasn’t a church song.
He J oined up with various other traveling bands ,
sometimes performing in drag as Princess La-
vonne. One group, B. Brown and His Orchestra,
named him Little Richard.

After years on the chitlin’ circuit, Little Rich-
ard got a break with Specialty Records, which
brought him to Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio
in New Orleans in 1955, in the back of an ap-
pliance store on Rampart Street. And here, in
the history of American music, by accident or
fate, the contingencies aligned just so. “I cre-
ated rock & roll, didn’t even know what 1 was
doing,” Richard said.

In the studio. Specialty’s producer Bumps
Blackwell found a wild-dressing, wild-talking
man with his hair waved up half a foot. But
Blackwell thought that the first tracks they
recorded were too mild, too milquetoast, espe-
cially for a guy whose stage act was famously
outlandish and untamed. “If you look like Tar-
zan and sound hke Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t

work out,” Blackwell later explained.

They went to take a break at the Dew Drop
Inn on LaSalle Street. Out of the studio. Little
Richard immediately started hamming it up for
the scattering of daytime drunks. “Boosters,
rounders, pimps, whores was hanging around,”
Blackwell said. “That’s all you gotta do is give
Richard an audience.” He went to the piano and
banged out a raunchy ode to sodomy that he used
to play at the dodgier clubs on the circuit: “A
wop bop a loo mop / A good goddamn / Tutti
Frutti / Good booty / If it don’t fit / Don’t force
it / You can grease it / Make it easy.”

And a good goddamn, thought Bumps Black-
well — now that is what I need to get on record.
Blackwell brought in a local songwriter, Dorothy
LaBostrie, to write some family-friendly lyrics.
“Good booty” became “awrutti,” and then there
was a girl named Sue and a gal named Daisy.

LaBostrie delivered the words with just fif-
teen minutes of studio time left, and that was all
it took. This was the Little Richard they called
“War Hawk” in church because of his holler-
ing and screaming. This was the Little Richard
who used to bang on tin cans and wail as a boy;
one of his brothers remembered, “I thought he
couldn’t sing, anyway, just a noise." The Little

Richard whose protege, Jimi Hendrix, would
later say that he wanted to do with his guitar
what Richard did with his voice. This was the
freak, the circus showman, the vamping diva,
the Holy Ghost. He sounds breathless and fierce,
a little unhinged. He sounds like the last man
on earth singing the first song ever written.

The bubblegum lyrics don’t change the ur-
gency of the song, barely contain the sex and
fury and fun. Nonsense can deliver a perfectly
coherent message depending on the way you
say it. And, wooo, how he said it. Like a preacher
speaking, lasciviously, in tongues.

You have turned my mourning
into dancing for me

L ittle Richard, now eighty-two years old, has
reportedly been living the last several years in a
penthouse suite at the Hilton hotel in downtown
Nashville (the Hilton will neither confirm nor
deny that they have a guest named Mr. Penni-
man). Most NashviUians I’ve talked to have no

I

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06 -

WINTER 2015

idea, although a local country singer told me he
once happened to spot Richard sitting in the pas-
senger seat of his black stretch Cadillac Escalade, the
window cracked. He shouted out Little Richard s
name and Richard rolled down the window to say,
“God bless you,” and hand him a book of prayers.

Richard doesn’t get out on the town much. He
has been confined to a wheelchair since hip surgery
in 2009 that he says went awry. Here’s how he
explained it last summer in a rare pubhc appear-
ance, at Nashville’s Wildhorse Saloon, where he
was honored at a luncheon hosted by the National
Museum of African American Music:

“I came to Nashville to see my sister. I bought a
home for me and her here in the hills. And 1 went
in for surgery on my hip. 1 was walking on my way
in but 1 couldn’t walk out. The hip surgery was
really bad for me. 1 haven’t walked since. I’m in
pain twenty-four hours a day. 1 have never seen
nothing like it.”

1 knew someone who knew someone who had
Little Richard’s cell phone number, and in June,
I cold-called him. To my surprise, he picked up.
He was kind but adamant about not doing an
interview. He told me about his hip, about how
much pain he was in. “People have been calling me
from all over the world,” he said. “But 1 haven’t
been doing any interviews. I’ve been refusing all
of them. I’ll be eighty-three on December 5. The
Lord has blessed me to still be alive.”

He told me about the event at the Wildhorse a
week later and I decided to show up. He wouldn’t
be performing or anything — I believe him when
he says he won’t ever be performing again — but,
well, I just wanted to see him. When he was a
boy, people in Macon thought Richard was a
healer. The Beatles, when they first met him,
kept wanting to touch his hands. Think of the
teenage fans who used to fight over his clothes.
Or offer up their own: a Little Richard concert in
Baltimore in 1956 is supposedly the first incident
of female fans throwing their underwear onstage
(“a shower of panties,” a bandmate remembered).

It was around eleven in the morning when the
Escalade rolled past the honky-tonks on Broadway
and turned down Second Avenue to the Wildhorse.
Downtown Nashville in the morning is strange —
the honky-tonks have opened for the early-bird
tourists, cover bands playing Hank and Elvis and
Jerry Lee. But the neon lights aren’t on yet, so the
reds, pinks, and purples are dingy and dim.

Richard’s entourage, four men dressed in suits
and Secret Service shades, made quick work, lift-
ing Richard out of the passenger seat, into his
wheelchair, and onto the red carpet. The whole
operation looked like a kidnapping in reverse.

Little Richard wore a paisley jacket with a

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107 -

psychedelic floral pattern over a polka-dot
button-up shirt, a pompadour hairpiece, rhine-
stone boots, and gold sunglasses, which he never
removed. I can report to you, readers, that the
self-proclaimed king and queen of rock & roll
looked fabulous.

He also looked, of course, like an octogenar-
ian, a little bit frail. He was in a surly mood
when he arrived because the whole red carpet
thing presented a problem. He did not want
to be photographed in a wheelchair. “1 really
don’t want anyone seeing me like this,” he said.

By the time he received his award, he was in
better spirits. He told stories about the old days
in Nashville, playing gigs as a teenager at the
New Era Club, sleeping at the YMCA because
the white hotels wouldn’t let him in. He had his
bodyguards hand out copies of a book. Finding
Peace Within, to members of the audience. “ Y’all
keep me in your prayers,” he said.

After the Wildhorse, I talked to Richard a few
more times briefly on the phone; he was always
polite but wouldn’t budge on the topic of an
interview. “I’ve been going through a lot of pain
and stuff and it ain’t worth it to me,” he said.

The last time we spoke, he told me, “I’m really
not interested in that kind of thing right now.

baby. I’ve been real sick. I’m sick, I’m really
trying to get well, baby.” He checked to make
sure I had gotten the book he handed out and
made me promise that I would read it.

Music fans are insatiable. The records are not
enough. We are historians, anthropologists, ar-
chivists, psychologists. Little Richard is not just
a legend but one of the last people alive among
that first wave of rock & roll, the prime movers
and shakers. So it is probably inevitable to treat
Richard Penniman hke a public treasure. If Rich-
ard is gracious, if he keeps thanking God simply
that he is still ahve, we are gracious, too. Every
minute that he remains on this earth feels pre-
cious. Start the tape recorders, aim the cameras.

But there comes a day when what we want
and need from our legends no longer jibes with
what fragile human beings have to give. When
bodies break down. In 1964, when folklorists
found the legendary country blues singer Skip
James, dying of stomach cancer in a charity hos-
pital in Tunica, Mississippi, they begged him to
play again. James supposedly answered, “I don’t
know. Skippy tired.”

If Richard had granted an interview, what
would I have asked? Not about the pain, which is
probably all he can think about and all he wants

to talk about. The old stories — Sister Rosetta
Tharpe at the Macon City Auditorium, Miss
Ann and the Tick-Tock Club, the Beatles, the
Stones, the gospel songs with Quincy Jones, the
years preaching as an evangelist, Vegas, Pancake
3 1 makeup, the “wonderful orgies” (his words)
and the threesome with Buddy Holly, angel
dust and cocaine, a signifying satellite in outer
space — he’s told those tales a million times, and
maybe there’s nothing much more to tell. What
is fresh and vital and constant is the pain.

Keep Little Richard in your prayers. Praise
and thanksgiving. And intercession too. May
he find comfort and ease. May he find a little
more of that old rhythm, a little more of that
wild light.

The book that Richard hands out is a col-
lection of Bible verses, along with a modern-
ized version of Ellen G. White’s Steps to Christ.
White was a cofounder of the Seventh-day Ad-
ventist Church in the nineteenth century after
she had a series of more than a hundred visions,
of Jesus and of yeUow-haired angels.

The last line in the book: “And there is joy
in heaven in the presence of God and the holy
angels over one soul redeemed, a joy that is
expressed in songs of holy triumph.”

SATURDAY ALEXANDRIA

MAY 28, 2016 AMPHITHEATER

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08 -

WINTER 20I5

And there shall he signs in the sun,
and in the moon, and in the stars

♦ ♦ ♦

A different sort of troublemaker, Martin Lu-
ther, wrote in a letter to a friend in 1530,
“Whenever the devil harasses you thus, seek
the company of men, or drink more, or joke and
talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing.
Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate
ourselves, aye, and even sin a little to spite the
devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling
our consciences with trifles.”

Richard was often torn between his life as
a Christian and his life as a rock & roll sinner.
“I would get up off an orgy and go pick up my
Bible,” he once explained. “Sometimes 1 would
have the Bible right by me.”

During one spell as an evangelist, he preached
that “this kind of music is demonic.” Certainly,
if you watch videos of Little Richard perform-
ing, he looks something like possessed. But
the spirit he found, the way we move to Little
Richard songs, must be a holy thing. Beyond
boogie; the ecstatic mode, to spite the devil.

At the Wildhorse in Nashville, Richard told
the crowd: “1 just want y’all also to know that
Jesus is coming soon. I’m serious. He’s been
talking to me and 1 just want you to know that
and remember that something is fixing to hap-
pen in this old world. Get closer to God. All
of you. Black people and white people. White
people, you get closer too. He made you too.
Everybody, get closer.”

Richard said something similar at a Recording
Academy fund-raiser in Atlanta in 20 1 3 . “God
talked to me the other night,” he told CeeLo
Green, in what might end up being his last in-
terview, and probably the last public appearance
in which Little Richard was fully in character
as himself. “He said He’s getting ready to come.
The world’s getting ready to end . . . and He’s
coming, wrapped in flames of fire with a rainbow
around his throne.”

When someone in the audience laughed,
Richard said: “When 1 talk to you about God,
I’m not playing.”

And who am I to say that Little Richard
is wrong? For all of us, actuarially speaking,
sooner or later the end is nigh. So let us dance :
black and white, man and woman, believer and
heathen. And everything in between. Let us
dance, all of us, while we are still able, while
we still can.

Hammer
in Her Hand

BY

RACHAEL MADDUX

B everly “Guitar” Watkins is seventy-six
years old. She is wearing house slippers,
a hair net, and an Atlanta Hawks t-shirt
on backwards. She is probably the greatest liv-
ing blues guitarist that no one has ever heard
of. Today, she is trying to sell her couch. “This
couch is nice," she says. Watkins stoops and
smacks the button that makes part of it lean and
a footrest pop out. “It does that on both sides. It
cost four hundred dollars. My son picked it out
for me. I’m selling it for two hundred.”

She is trying to sell her couch because she
wants to move out of this apartment on the
third floor of a seniors-only complex in Atlanta’s
Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. Down in the
lobby, a gaggle of women her age sit propped
up in wheelchairs, their faces lit by daytime
TV Hidden speakers pipe an endless playlist
of schmaltzy pop standards into every hallway
and common room. It’s a nice enough place, but
it’s not her scene.

“I want to be where I can be free," she says.
“I live that rock & roll lifestyle.”

Watkins learned to play guitar as a child
and began playing professionally while still
in high school. In the 1960s, she played on
recordings that inspired a generation of white
rock & rollers, toured with bands across North
America and Europe, opened for Ray Charles
and James Brown and B.B. King. She caught
the early wave of soul music, crashed on the
sandbar of disco, brushed herself off, and kept
on going. She reinvented herself as a solo art-
ist at fifty, recorded her first album at sixty,
survived multiple brushes with death, and did
it all almost completely without celebration,
peer, or precedent.

And she’s still doing it. Last Thursday she
played her regular gig at Blind Willie’s over in
Virginia-Highland. Testerday she spent all day
at one of the two churches where she worships
and performs every month. Tuesday she’s play-

ing a memorial birthday party for her cousin
Freddie, who died last year. Saturday, the Fourth
of July, she ’splaying a kids’ soccer game. Sunday
afternoon, she and the Meter-Tones, one of her
several backing bands, will play to travelers in
the atrium of the Atlanta airport. On her days
off, she rehearses. Watkins credits her talents
to God.

But if God made her good, she made herself
great.

Watkins’s phone rings. On the other end is
Rob Baskerville, the leader of another one of her
backing bands, the King Bees. He’s calling about
their upcoming performance at a music festival
in Minnesota. There’s the issue of promotion.
Watkins’s website and Facebook page haven’t
been updated in a while — the most recent post
is about her seventy-fourth birthday celebration
at Atlanta’s Northside Tavern two Aprils ago.
Given her age, the silence raises some questions.
“That’s gotta be done," she tells Baskerville.
“The people don’t know if I’m dead or alive!”

B everly Watkins was born in 1939. Her
mother died when she was three months
old, so she was raised by her grandparents and
her mother’s sisters — first in Atlanta, then out
in rural Commerce, Georgia, then back in At-
lanta. Her grandfather was a sharecropper and
played banjo at bam dances. Her aunts Margaret,
Bea, and Nell sang in a group called the Hayes
Sisters that traveled around, performing at lo-
cal churches and parties. The voices of Marie
Knight and Sister Rosetta Tharpe hved inside
the horn of her grandmother’s Victrola. Young
Beverly was a mimic, singing and plucking on
thin air.

Watkins was eight when her aunt Nell bought
her a guitar from the Sears-Roebuck catalog,
a child-sized Stella. The first song she taught
herself to play was “John Henry.” In high
school, she won a talent show playing “Blue
Suede Shoes” on that tiny Stella, in the rough,
finger-picked style she still employs. By then
she’d picked up piano and bass and trumpet,
and her school’s bandmaster had noticed her tal-
ent. “When he ordered the instruments for the
school, he ordered a guitar,” she says — electric,
full-sized. “He turned me all the way around.”
The bandmaster got Watkins to play in stan-
dard tuning, and then things started happening
fast. She’d already been playing bass with a
local band called Billy West Stone and the
Down Beats. Next she got an audition with
Piano Red, a black albino barrelhouse bluesman
who’d been playing and recording through-
out the South since before Watkins was born.

OxfordAmerican.org

09 -

4

He’d had a few national hits in the early fifties
(“Rockin’ with Red,” “Red’s Boogie”) and was
looking to tour with some younger folks .Dur-
ing her senior year of high school, Watkins
was drafted into his new act as one of three
rhythm guitarists.

Dr. Feelgood and the Interns started out
playing at clubs and colleges around Atlanta
and eventually went national. They signed to
Okeh Records, a division of Columbia, and
recorded what would become Piano Red’s final
hits: “Doctor Feel-Good” and “Right String but
the Wrong Yo-Yo, ” a remake of one of his earlier
songs. The B-side to 1961 ’s “Doctor Feel-Good”
was a song called “Mister Moonlight, ” written
and sung by Roy Lee Johnson, another one of
the band’s guitarists. The single found favor
among young blues-gobbling white musicians ,
especially in the U.K. Johnny BCidd & the Pirates
recorded a cover of “Doctor Feel-Good,” and
the Merseybeats, the Hollies, and the Beatles
all covered “Mister Moonlight.”

The tours were exhausting, and not just be-

cause of their schedules. The mid-1960s was
a tricky time for a group of black kids to be
traveling around America. The band was often
booked to play in hotels that didn’t allow black
guests. In some cities, the group would send
Piano Red into a restaurant to order food for the
whole band — his pigmentless skin allowed him
to pass as, if not white, then at least not black.

As a young black woman, Watkins was in
a doubly tricky spot. Sometimes Piano Red’s
niece Zelda came on tour to keep her company,
but otherwise she was the only woman around,
in the van and onstage. (The male Interns wore
white doctors’ coats when they played ; she wore
a nurse’s uniform and hat.) “Piano Red was just
like my dad,” she says, “and they was like my
brothers, all the band members back then. Piano
Red said, ‘If you all go out anywhere, make sure
you take care of Beverly.’ And they did. I was
very attractive. If somebody would walk up to
me, want to talk to me, I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s
my husband right there’ — I’d pick somebody in
the band.” At twenty-four she got pregnant,

gave birth to a son, and kept on touring.

Watkins was an instrumentalist, not a singer,
which made her even more of an oddity. The
images of black men playing guitar and black
women cradling a microphone long ago became
our ubiquitous hieroglyphs of the blues, and
even now the image of a black woman playing
guitar still registers as something crackling and
new. It’s not that Watkins had no one to look to
as she was coming up — in the thirties and forties
there had been Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mem-
phis Minnie; in the fifties and sixties, Peggy
Jones was performing as Lady Bo in Bo Diddley’s
band and Odetta was modestly popular on the
folk scene. But the path cut before her by these
women was faint, and mostly uphill.

Not that Watkins needed a path. The greats
rarely do. In the first verse of “John Henry,” the
steel-driving man is just a baby with a hammer in
his hand, singing, “Hammer’s gonna be the death
ofme.”AsJohn Henry was always J ohn Henry,
Beverly Watkins was always Beverly Watkins.
Sometimes fate just makes itself known.

WINTER 2015

Beverly “Guitar” Watkins with Cootie Stark and Sammy Blue, Northsidc Tavern, Atlanta (1998). Photo by Mark Austin

P iano Red changed the name of his band a few
times — Dr. Feelgood and the Interns, Piano
Red and the Houserockers — before the act dis-
solved in 1969 (he died of cancer in 1985). By
1970, Watkins had joined up with Leroy Red-
ding, cousin of Otis, and was playing in his band,
also called the Houserockers. She played for a
few other groups, with musicians she loved and
admired, but the work wasn’t what it used to be.
Soul and r&b begat disco, and many of the first
white rock bands to feed on the output of black
American blues artists had given way to their own
imitators. There was even a white British rock
band called Dr. Feelgood, named after the Johnny
Kidd & the Pirates’ cover. (They’re stiU tour-
ing; their website calls “Dr. Feelgood” a “blues
standard” and makes no mention of Piano Red.)

Watkins had spent half her life in bands that
helped build a world that now had no place for
her. She returned to Atlanta and started looking
for work offstage. She worked at a car wash,
cleaned houses, cleaned offices. But she never
stopped playing music.

Piano Red had spent ten years as the house
musician at Muhlenbrink’s Saloon in Under-
ground Atlanta, a downtown retail district that
closed in 1980. When it opened again in 1989,
Watkins installed herself as the unofficial house
musician of the food court, playing for tips.
Billing herself as Mama Watkins, she played
blues standards and oldies, sometimes with
a drummer and her son on bass, other times
with Just her guitar and a drum machine. She
started singing, too. She’d learned a certain kind
of showmanship from her years with Piano
Red — the matching outfits and the dance moves
he demanded of his bands, his cheerful rapport
with the audience — and now she was develop-
ing her own style. She’d goose-step like James
Brown, sling her guitar around her neck and
play a crackling solo behind her head, then hold
a note and drop down into a half-split on the
concrete. She didn’t make much, sometimes just
forty dollars a night, but she couldn’t afford to
be discouraged. A friend told her she needed
a catchier name if she ever wanted to make a
record. It seemed like a distant prospect, but
she became Beverly “Guitar” Watkins anyway.
Just in case.

In 1990, Watkins started showing up at
Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, a barbecue joint with a
Wednesday night jam session that had become
a haven for Atlanta’s older blues musicians.
The usual crowd included her former bandmate
Eddie Tigner, singer Cora Mae Bryant, and one-
armed harmonica player Neal Pattman, each
trying to figure out how to stay alive and keep

making music in a world unconcerned with
whether or not they accomplished either. Also
among the regulars was a twenty-five-year-old
white kid from Savannah named Danny Dudeck,
a singer and slide guitarist who’d just begun to
perform blues under the name Mudcat.

Dudeck was taken with Watkins from note
one. On Wednesday nights he’d watch through
Fat Matt’s big front window for her to arrive,
then sidle up to the stage, hoping for a chance
to play with her. “It just seemed obvious,” he
says. “Tbu go to the deepest well to find the
strongest stuff.”

Over the next few years, as he built his own
career, Dudeck helped book Watkins at North-
side Tavern on Atlanta’s industrial Westside,
took her to Paris for her first international solo
gig, and brought her along to play blues festivals
all over the South. He did the same for Tigner
and Bryant and Pattman and others, too, and
his work caught the attention of a man named
Tim Duffy. In 1994, Duffy founded the Music
Maker Relief Foundation, in North Carolina,
to help unsupported artists — usually black,
elderly, and financially vulnerable — land re-
cord contracts, studio time, and live bookings.
He asked Dudeck for names and Dudeck told
him about Watkins. The next time Duffy came
through Atlanta, he stopped downtown to hear
her play.

“It was just her and an electric guitar with
no rhythm track — nothing, just her,” Duffy
says. “And then she started hitting a note and
going with it and grabbing it and feeling it to her
chest and dropping to her knees and playing it
behind the head. A lot of musicians that solo, I
would call it a ‘look at me, look at me, look at me’
lick — but Watkins was playing the blues from
the center of her heart and it was just there for
everyone to enjoy. I was transfixed. Ever since
that, just thinking about it, I can hear the guitar
solo in my head.”

He put fifty dollars in her tip bucket. Watkins
remembers it: “He said, ‘Beverly, I want to help
you.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna see if I can get you
a recording contract.’ I said, ‘Okay, alright.’”

A few months later, Watkins was recording
with Mike Vernon, the British musician and
record executive who’d produced records by
early David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, and Eric
Clapton. (He’d also produced the 1979 album by
the other Dr. Feelgood.) In 1999, Music Maker
released Watkins’s first record. Back in Business.
She was sixty years old.

W ith Music Maker behind her, doors began
to open where only walls had been before.

For two years, Watkins traveled around the U.S.
with blues multi-instrumentalist Taj Mahal
on the Winston Blues Revival, a massive tour
sponsored by the cigarette company. She was one
of a few supporting acts until, one night, Mahal
switched their billing, telling the crowd, “Don’t
leave — you’re in for something! ” Dudeck, who
played in Watkins’s band on the tour, remembers
watching the crowd watch her — the dropped
jaws, the tears on the faces, the crowd of hun-
dreds having the same reaction he’d had twenty
years ago at Fat Matt’s, the same reaction Tim
Duffy had watching her in an empty food court
at Underground Atlanta. “It’s in her hands,”
Dudeck says. “When you hear that one note,
people turn their heads, your jaw drops. Tbu
can write poetry about it, but you can’t really
say why it was so important. She does that.”

Music Maker helped Watkins release her
second album. The Feelings of Beverly “Guitar”
Watkins, in 2005. Around the same time, she
got sick after a show in Washington, D.C., and
made it to the hospital just before one of her
heart valves clenched shut. While she was in
the hospital, recovering from the heart attack,
doctors found a mass on the upper lobe of her
left lung. To get the cancer out they had to slice
down her left side, leaving a scar like a shark
bite. For months she couldn’t raise her arm high
enough to hold her guitar, let alone hoist it
over her head. It was a year before she could
work again, two before she was able to do her
signature trick.

Now her skills are sharper than ever. She still
takes lessons, still learns new licks and chords,
and she still holds her bands to the same high
standards she’s always had: “Back in ’em days
when I came up, I had to practice,” she says.
“If we were late for practice twice, I mean, the
next time you didn’t play. That’s the way it was
when I was in Piano Red’s band. My band now,
they have to be on time. And we practice. And
we sound good.”

This is what she means when she says she
lives “that rock & roll lifestyle.” She can’t
rehearse with a band at her apartment at the
seniors-only complex. She wants to be some-
where she can spread out, maybe even some-
where with a yard (she wants to grow some
tomatoes and peanuts and collards). But before
she moves, she wants to make another gospel
album (her first was 2009’s The Spiritual Ex-
pressions of Beverly “Guitar” Watkins) and then
another blues record. All this on top of the gigs
at Blind Willie’s and Fat Matt’s and Northside
and all the soccer games and birthday parties
and airport terminals in between.

OxfordAmerican.org

Last December, an aneurysm left Watkins
carrying a stent in her brain and wearing thick,
prismed glasses to correct her vision. After years
of straining to sing into poorly engineered sound
systems, her vocal chords are in rough shape,
too. But she’s waited, and worked, a lifetime
for this. Music is the only sort of future she
ever imagined for herself, even when it was all
but unimaginable. Now she lives it every day.

“1 did want to go to the Air Force,” she says.
“They came to my house when I was a senior
and 1 took the test, but I flunked the vocabulary
test. 1 didn’t know 1 could have volunteered and
went on in the Army and played in the band.
But 1 don’t reckon that is what the Lord wanted
me to do. So here I am, from there to here I am,
and I’m still rolling.”

I n late August, Mudcat booked a gig at North-
side Tavern, with the Atlanta Horns, and
invited Watkins to play as his special guest.
Northside is a lone grimy holdout on Atlan-
ta’s gentrified Westside. As the old industrial
buildings get turned into condos and upscale
retail shops and restaurants with staff mixolo-
gists, the squat little concrete-block building
remains as it’s always been, smoky and neon

with revelers overflowing into the parking lots
on Saturday nights.

Dudeck and the band started the show with
a second-line performance of “When the Saints
Go Marching In,” blaring brass and washboard
and banjo, weaving through the packed room.
Watkins brought up the rear, wearing a navy
pantsuit and blowing kisses to the crowd. Dur-
ing Mudcat ’s set, she sat in the back, next to the
merchandise table, sipping from a giant coffee
mug. To anyone who didn’t know better, she
must have looked out of place — not that anyone’s
attention was anywhere but the stage, or the
dance floor down in front, where the college
kids and the recently ex-college kids and the
middle-aged bachelorettes danced and grinned
in the sweaty cigarette haze.

After a while, Dudeck stepped back from
the mic and trombonist Lil’ Joe Burton came
forward. He spoke through the crackling din of
the crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen . . . Atlanta
blues legend . . . ten-year cancer survivor . . .
we call her Mama Watkins . . . you call her . . .
Beverly ‘Guitar’ Watkins!”

Watkins floated to the stage, hopped up,
grabbed her black-and-white Fender Strato-
caster, and welcomed the crowd with a big hello

just like Piano Red taught her. The band fell
in beat right behind her, pummeling through
“Back in Business” and covers of “My Girl” and
“Shake, Rattle and Roll” and Watkins’s own
version of “Wrong Yo-Tb. ” An older woman in a
sparkly poncho twirled and twisted and swung
her hips like she wasn’t also holding a fold-up
walking cane. A cluster of white dudes in polo
shirts took turns doing a dance that involved
doffing a straw sombrero. An extremely tall
black man stood in the middle of the crowd,
recording video of the band with his iPhone,
his face slack with awe.

That night at Northside, Watkins was in-
dulgent, profligate. Every time she hoisted the
guitar above her head, the wild crowd went
wilder. And every time, she grirmed under the
weight of it, never missing a measure, never
slowing down. A body in motion stays in mo-
tion, and she’s been on the move for years. What
she’s in search of is not a place she could rent,
not a place to stick a couch. All she really needs
is space enough for a small woman and a big
guitar and the crowd that always follows. It’s
here she’s most at home — onstage, in the thick
of it, hammer in her hand. At home, and very
much alive.

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WINTER 2015

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the legends, landmarks and live #GeorgiaMusic.

0 Georgia®

On My Mind

— o

Got to
Ease Up On

BY

NATHAN SALSBURG

B essie Jones got the Holy Ghost in the vicini-
ty of Fitzgerald, Georgia, on September 28,
1932. It didn’t happen in a church but in a
vision: a taU man approached her with three tick-
ets representing three separate denominations.
She chose the Pentecostal Holiness, thereafter
taking up membership in the Church of God in
Christ. The ecstatic mysticism of COGIC suited

Bessie, who from early girlhood was acutely at-
tuned to portents, signs, and superstitions, culti-
vating an abiding sense of the spiritually sublime
in her work, her relationships, and, especially,
her music. She nurtured a prodigious repertoire
of songs — hundreds of them, for work, play,
worship, instruction — as both a rite and as a voca-
tion. For Bessie, music was a means of honoring
her enslaved ancestors, as she called them, and
uplifting her hard-driven contemporaries . “Those
folks were going through some hardships,” she
told the scholar John Stewart in 1978, “and all
those good songs, and the meanings of those
songs, the Lord gave it to them. It was handed
down to them without any schoohng. And that’s
why I’ve been so delighted to keep it going the
old way — the way they had it.”

Jones joined the Spiritual Singers of Coastal
Georgia after moving to St. Simons Island in the
early thirties. The group had been organized
around 1915 by Lydia Parrish (wife of painter
Maxfield Parrish) and their charter was a con-
servative one — preserving through performance

the antebellum spirituals and shouts, the deep
African roots of which had remained largely
untouched due to the relative isolation of the
sea island. Thus the addition of Bessie to their
ranks was remarkable. She contributed material
inherited from her step-grandfather. Jet Samp-
son, a prolific singer and multi-instrumentalist
born into slavery; ring plays picked up as a girl
in South Georgia, around Dawson; work songs
learned from convict road gangs, Bahamian fish-
ermen, and Gulf Coast roustabouts; and hymns
and songs for worship gathered from a good
half-dozen black churches.

By the time folklorist Alan Lomax visited
St. Simons with a stereo tape-machine in 1959,
Bessie Jones and many of her songs had become
fundamental to the ensemble (soon to be re-
christened, by Bessie, the Georgia Sea Island
Singers). Lomax was entranced. He invited her
to New %rk City for the recording of her “oral
biography,” which, when it was completed,
covered some thirty hours of tape, including
reminiscences, ghost stories, tall tales, jokes,
religious testimony, herbal remedies, and many,
many songs. Over the course of these sessions,
the principals discovered that they were compil-
ing the raw material for a large-scale pedagogical
project to which, over the next twenty years,
Bessie Jones would devote herself with reli-
gious fervor, teaching the old-time songs, plays,
and lore to children and adults alike, across the
country, in kindergarten classrooms and folk
festivals, nightclubs, the Poor People’s March on
Washington, Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. Her
vision was one of radical egalitarianism, inspired
by the enduring collective, expressive folk tradi-
tions — occupational, recreational, spiritual — of
the black rural South and her ardent faith in a
kind of ecstatic liberation theology, which found
activist application in the civil rights movement.
It was the right time for Bessie to do her work.

The entirety of Bessie Jones’s oral biography
is available in free streaming audio through
the online archive of Lomax’s Association for
Cultural Equity. What follows is one small ex-
cerpt, particularly illustrative of Bessie’s mys-
tical worldview and the often-visionary oral
poetry in which she expressed it.

G od made the whole world’s flowers — every
tree, every hush — and had to make different
flowers to make a bouquet. That’s for us to pick in
together; we’s for Him to pick in together. Had to
make different color for a bouquet for Him. We’s
His flowers. He pick us as He want to.

WINTER 2015

“Bessie Jones, St. Simons Island, Georgia” (1941), by Edward Weston. © The Lane Collection. Photograph Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

lot of folks in the grave today on account of
someone called them “nigger. ” ’Cause they
got mad about it. Didn ’t understand. 1 remem-
ber a white lady, my white lady told me, says,
“People get mad about that, Bessie, hut they ought
to be glad that they are one. ” I still is as mad at
her right then, and I said, “Now, what are you
talking about?” I would go on to read it and I
find it on there, where the Lord said that would
he: that slang name on earth for what we ’re the
Ethiopians. And we’re one of the greatest people
on the face of the earth. If you would just under-
stand it, see. And we’s a nation. And everything.
But I just didn’t know it. And 1 was talking to
my daughter-in-law about it, and she’s pricked
against it, you know, and I kept on talking and
after she got saved, and go further ’way with the
Bible, and began to read, and I ease up on and
ease up on — you got to ease up on, you know; you
can’tfeedababy off of hones, you know; you got
to give him milk, you know — and so I just ease
up on, ease up on till 1 got her to see it. Now she J
as happy with it as she can he. She understand it.
It’s just a slang word, Jesus said, that earthy name
they call you. And then it goes on that way, over
there. It’s in Acts — Apostles, 1 think it’s around
the fifth chapter, hut anyway, you see straight-out
nigger, the first nigger convert. That’s Enoch. And
Queen ofSheha was so black, it’s pitiful. She’s as
black as my son. Real dark. Like pretty smooth
black skin, had long black hair — that’s Queen
of Sheba. The greatest queen. And the prettiest
woman of the time. And Jesse was a black man,
you see. That was Mary’s father. And Mary is
Jesus’s mother. Where be say that I am of the
Ethiopian tribe. Root and offspring of David.
You know David black.

he colored peoples and the nationality of
peoples — I’m talking about the nation of
people — all over the country, to my eye and
my belief, everywhere in the world, I believe
we should realize that peoples are just people.
And you ’re human and you got to die. We all
realize and know that God don ’t think no more
of you than he do of me. That’s what we oughta
see. If God loved you — I was talking to a white
lady then — if He loved you more than He did
me, He wouldn’t let you have to even birth a
baby: He’d let your childrens come on up to you
before you. You got to get ’em like I get ’em. You
got to go through what I go through it. You got to
shed blood. You got to die for that child. That’s
right. You got to stink like everybody else. That’s
true. Everything is right. But if God thought any
more any different in it, well. He would make
it different.

— ©—

You Don’t Know
What You Mean
To Me

BY

JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

an eriously?” said the teenage girl work-
mg behind the desk at the office of the
Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Totowa,
New Jersey. “You’re like the fourth person in
the last couple days to ask about him.” It was a
humid Thursday afternoon in early July, and I
was looking for Dave Prater’s grave. A middle-
aged woman working nearby chimed in: “Who
was he, anyway?”

As one half of Sam & Dave, Prater’s voice
can be heard on some of the most enduring
r&b recordings of the last half-century. In the
mid-sixties. Prater and his partner, Sam Moore,
crafted a live act so unparalleled in its sweaty
tent-revival ecstasy that Otis Redding, sick of
being upstaged by his opener, once claimed:
“I never want to have to follow those mother-
fuckers again.” Tet since his death in 1988, the
man who was best known to the world simply
as Dave has receded from the popular history
of sixties r&b, erased from our pantheon of
soul legends.

After I told the women that Dave had been
a famous musician, they remained perplexed as
to the recent surge of interest in his grave. “Was
it a recent anniversary, or anything like that?”
Not as far as I could tell.

“Can you think of any reason why everyone
would be visiting now?”

I could not.

F ive months earlier, a small town in south-
central Georgia was hosting its own Dave
Prater remembrance. Ocilla, Dave’s hometown,
is best known for its Sweet Potato Festival, held
every autumn since 1961. Residents from the
surrounding area participate in cooking contests,
compete in the pageant to determine the annual
Miss Georgia Sweet Potato, and buy t-shirts that
say Rise & Shine, It’s Tater Time. Ocilla, which

has a population just north of 3 ,000, is also home
to the region’s largest private employer, the Ir-
win County Detention Center, where hundreds
of undocumented immigrants are indefinitely
detained in what the Georgia A.C.L.U. has de-
scribed as “substandard conditions.”

In February, fifty-some-odd members of the
extended Prater family traveled to Ocilla from
all over the country to attend Dave Prater Day.
On a Friday afternoon, several hundred people
gathered downtown. It was chilly, even for
February, and food trucks sold hot cocoa and
coffee for a dollar. The celebration began with
a talent show, where a few locals sang George
Strait and Hootie & the Blowfish. Prater’s grand-
daughter Shalonda won the competition with
her rendition of “When Something Is Wrong
with My Baby.”

Throughout the day, Sam & Dave played
over the PA, but something was missing. Dave’s
son Chris had remixed songs like “Hold on.
I’m Cornin’,” editing out Sam Moore’s high-
tenor parts and turning the duo’s greatest hits
into triumphant Prater solo records. Later on,
traffic stopped during a moment of silence,
and a congressman from the Georgia House of
Representatives read a resolution officially rec-
ognizing Prater as a “distinguished Georgian.”
At one point, four rectangular green signs were
unveiled that would adorn each of the major
roadways into town. They read:

Home of
“Dave Prater”

Sam & Dave - “Soul Man ”

1997 Georgia Music
Hall of Eame Inductee

Ocilla ’s Ghamber of Commerce had decided
to honor Prater as part of its celebration of Black
History Month. It was the first time the town
had ever recognized its most famous native.

“It should have happened a long time ago,”
said Mayor Horace Hudgins. Hudgins moved to
OciUa from nearby Homerville in 1987, a year
before Dave Prater lost control of his Chevy
and crashed into a tree on Interstate 75, just
twenty-five miles west of his hometown. Prater
had been driving home, as he did at the end of
every tour, to visit his mom. He was fifty.

am was the heavens, his voice was almost
kj not human,” Bruce Springsteen has said.
“But Dave rooted their music in the dirt and in
the earth.” From the beginning, Sam’s other-
worldly high tenor overshadowed Dave’s low
harmony, and for a variety of reasons — some

OxfordAmerican.org

115 -

personal, some practical, some musical — the
history of Sam & Dave has been rewritten in
the nearly thirty years since Praters death so as
to diminish Dave’s contributions. In Sam and
Dave: An Oral History, the only book published
on the duo, Dave isn’t mentioned until page 42.

Almost everyone I talked to who had worked
with Sam & Dave throughout their career said
a version of the same thing: Dave was the sec-
ondary member of the group. When I called
John Abbey, a British music industry veteran
who produced Sam & Dave in the seventies,
he apologized for having almost nothing to say
about Prater. “To be very honest with you, I
didn’t really get to know Dave anywhere near
as I did Sam,” he said. “Dave was, frankly, the
junior member of the team.”

Steve Alaimo, a sixties pop singer who pro-
duced Sam & Dave’s earliest singles in Miami,
went as far as to estimate that Sam & Dave was
“ninety percent Sam and ten percent Dave.”
“How do you say who’s responsible for
what?” Alaimo mused, resorting to a sports
analogy: “The quarterback does everything,
but it’s the lineman who picks up the fumble.

Without the lineman, the quarterback couldn’t
have had the ball in the first place.” In Sam &
Dave, Dave was the lineman.

Dave Prater was born to a pair of sharecrop-
pers in 1937, the seventh of ten children. When
Dave was seven, his father died in a fire, leaving
his mother, Mary Pressley, to raise the children.
As a boy, Dave took to singing, both at the Mt.
Olive A.M.E. Church that his family attended
each Sunday, and at work, picking tobacco with
his siblings in the fields after school. “He never
took lessons,” said Dave’s older sister Bertha
McMath, shortly after Dave passed away. “It was
just a talent given to him by the Good Master.”

One of Dave’s first public performances was
at his high school graduation, where he sang
a rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein
show tune “Tbu’llNever Walk Alone.” During
his thirty years as a professional singer, Dave
Prater took the song’s title quite literally. He
preferred, always, to sing with others. After
graduation, he fled to Miami to sing with the
Sensational Hummingbirds, his older brother
J.T.’s gospel group. Then he had a chance meet-
ing at a nightclub talent show with Sam Moore,

the angel-voiced tenor with whom
Dave would perform on and off
for the better part of twenty years.
Finally, when Prater’s relationship
with Moore became strained beyond
repair, he sang with Sam Daniels, a
high school English teacher from
Miami whom Prater enlisted to tour
with him in the eighties, much to
Moore’s chagrin, as “The New Sam
& Dave Revue.”

Despite all of the pain and disap-
pointment it caused him through-
out his life. Prater remained eter-
nally committed to singing as one
half of a pair, wed to the notion that
one can achieve something making
music with a partner that cannot be
achieved alone. “When you’re by
yourself, ” Prater said in the early
seventies, after his brief attempt at
going solo, “sometimes you look up
in the sky for that other voice, and
it ain’t there.”

Music’s inexplicable alchemy is
a frightening thing, and we tend
to make sense of it by rewarding
individual stardom whenever
possible. We lionize the auteurs,
those who appear to have absolute
authority over their own music:
Jimi, Joni, Woody, Nina. But what
does it mean to be famous not for the sound of
your own voice, but for the sound of your voice
blended with another’s?

“A lot of these duos have problems with
each other over the years,” said John Regna,
a Florida-based artist manager who served as
Dave Prater’s agent in the eighties. “They’re so
friendly onstage, and then the next time they
talk to each other is on the next stage. They have
different dressing rooms; they get to the gig in
different vehicles. It’s very interesting, from a
sociological point of view.”

The Louvin Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel,
the Righteous Brothers, Sam & Dave. It’s no
surprise that in a culture so intent on celebrat-
ing the stardom of selfhood, the two halves of
a singing duo often grow apart.

66 rri he fact is that together, Sam and Dave
X were magical," David Porter said, a word
he kept returning to. As the man who cowrote,
alongside Isaac Hayes, nearly every one of Sam
& Dave’s biggest hits at Stax Records, Porter
had a ringside ticket to the duo’s peak years in
the mid- to late-sixties. “I was happy to see that

WINTER 2015

David Porter, Sam Moore, and Dave Prater at a Sam & Dave recording session at Stax Reeords. © API Photographers Inc/Getty Images

there’s an interest to look into Dave and give
him some notice, because he deserves that,”
he told me.

Compared to Sam’s tenor, Dave’s gritty bari-
tone possessed a pedestrian frailty. Because his
voice seemed so mortal, so attainable, Prater
had a way of wringing every ounce of emo-
tion out of the simplest of lines, turning an
aphorism like “When something is wrong with
my baby, something is wrong with me” into a
world-ending cry of compassion. His voice was
a triumph of finding beauty through, and in
spite of, human limitation. While Sam fluttered
through falsetto, Dave scratched and fought
against his own range, arriving at a deep, unas-
suming sensitivity. Sam made singing seem easy;
Dave sweat his way through each line. Like Dave
himself, his voice was humble.

Prater thrived in the shadows of Sam & Dave,
reveling in his role of seasoned harmonizer,
jubilant supporter, occasional front man. Moore
usually handled the interviews. “Some artists
are great at telling stories. They understand the
nature of the interview, and they understand
that if they give good interviews, they’re go-
ing to get good press,” Rob Bowman, author
of Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of StaxRecords,
explained. “Dave Prater was not one of those
guys.”

“People need to know that there really was
a Dave,” said Deanie Parker, who worked as
Stax’s in-house publicist during the sixties. “It
is no surprise that Sam always surfaced in the
spotlight and Dave seemed to have been hid-
den in the shadows. That was the difference
in their personalities. Sam was the showman,
he needed the spotlight. It fueled him. On the
other hand, Dave was very quiet. You might
read that as passive, but I think Dave just chose
to be more reserved.”

“He was very comfortable being the second
banana,” Regna said. If Sam Moore never quite
accepted that his career was bound to the voice
of his singing partner. Prater prospered in the
unlikely arrangement. Prater’s voice burst into
life when it blended with Moore’s, when the two
delved into what David Porter has called “ab-
stract harmony parts,” the often unconventional,
occasionally dissonant, frequently transcendent
music that resulted when the two men shared
a microphone.

The hit-making solo singer has it easy. His
or her voice becomes immortalized; broadcast
through car radios, mimicked in showers, wor-
shipped in teenage bedrooms, canonized in “Best
of” hsts. “Every wedding you go to plays ‘Soul
Man,”’ said Rosemary Prater, Dave’s widow.

“Every anniversary party, every sweet sixteen.”
Sing with a partner for a living, and if, forty
years later, your songs are still being heard in
grocery stores and basketball arenas, who gets
to be remembered? At best, contributions and
credits disperse. More likely, they’re disputed.

T he same two words that decorated Dave
Prater’s car and license plate also receive
choice placement on the front of his gravestone:
Soul Man, the title of his biggest hit. But the
more curious inscription is on top of the grave-

stone: You were always on my mind.

“He was really adamant about that song, ” ex-
plained Rosemary at a nearby diner shortly after
my trip to the cemetery. Rosemary was talking
about Dave’s two all-time favorite songs, “The
Wonder of Tbu,” by Elvis Presley, a ballad he
had always hoped to record, and WiUie Nelson’s
version of “Always on My Mind, ” which meant
so much to Dave that Rosemary could think of
no finer inscription when her husband died one
month after Rosemary turned forty.

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in her sixties. When she doesn’t agree with
another person’s behavior, she will say things
like “that’s not my cup of tea” or “they’re just
going to have to reap what they sow.” During
our nearly three-hour conversation, she shared a
number of anecdotes about Sam & Dave, like the
time Ray Charles called Dave Prater at home in
the seventies asking if he could produce a Sam
& Dave record (the project never happened).
Or the time Sam Moore played drums and sang
for an entire show one New Year’s Eve after the
drummer didn’t show up.

Rosemary first met Dave in 1973, at a Sam &
Dave gig on the Jersey shore. Dave had taken
a cab to the show from his hotel in Newark
and paid the driver to stay until the end of the
concert. But the driver took off early, and Dave
needed a ride back to the Holiday Inn. Newark
was on Rosemary’s way home. The next day.
Prater called her to see if she wanted to come
to his show that evening. Before long, Dave had
relocated to Paterson, where Rosemary lived.
They moved in together, married in 1982, and
he lived there for the rest of his life.

Prater’s kids called him Daddy Dave. As road
gigs started to thin out in the eighties, Dave
spent more time at home, where he liked to

cook fried fish, butter beans, and cabbage for
Rosemary and two of his sons from his first
marriage, who had moved up to Paterson from
Miami. “Dave was a family person, ” Rosemary
said. “He was very dedicated to his mother. If
you didn’t like his mother, you didn’t hke him. ”

“What you saw was what you got with him, ”
said Willa Daniels, speaking on behalf of her
husband, Dave’s late-career partner, Sam Dan-
iels, who now suffers from Alzheimer’s. “Dave
was non-pretentious. He was old school. He had
this nickname for Sam — he called him Pete. 1 was
just talking to Sam the other day — we were like
‘Why did he call you Pete?’ Sam said, ‘1 don’t
know, but 1 think he called a lot of people that.’”

Around the comfort of close friends and fam-
ily, Dave was more outgoing. “My dad was
hilarious,” his son Anthony told me. “And he
could dance.”

“I do remember one thing,” John Regna said,
when I asked if he has any specific personal
memories of Dave. “When we would all sit
around and tell a story and laugh, his laugh
was so hearty that you got a second bite at the
laugh. Tbu’d laugh at whatever the story was,
and then you’d laugh because of how much he
was laughing.”

“Everybody who met Dave liked him,” said
Rosemary. “He was a joyful person. Did he
have a bad side? Tm sure he did. Did he show
it sometimes or a lot of times? I’m sure he did. I
experienced both sides of it, but I take the good
and forget the bad, because the bad sides were
either tormented or imposed.”

T hat Sam and Dave managed to perform to-
gether for two decades is some small miracle.
It was a relationship perhaps fraught from the
start: Prater, with his nine siblings, a quiet
church boy from the country, and Moore, a
smooth-talking, mischievous only child from
Miami (in his sixties, Sam Moore discovered
he was actually born in Macon County, Geor-
gia, less than one hundred miles from Ocilla).
“David and I were weyer really close,” Moore
says in Sam and Dave: An Oral History. Moore
claims that a cultural divide created distance be-
tween him and Prater. “I’m hanging with people
hke Jackie Wilson, B.B. King, Chuck Jackson,”
Moore brags in the book. “Dave would try, but
to tell you the truth, when Dave would show
up, they would be very cordial to Dave. They
weren’t rude, but as soon as Dave would leave,
they would laugh and they’d call him country.”

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Moore gave me a written statement when I
asked to interview him for this story. “I’ve been
accused of hating Dave,” he wrote. “I never have
hated him, even when things were a big and
ugly mess. For better or worse, we were a team
when it counted and our history is what it is.”

“When Dave killed himself,” he continued,
“which is how I look at what happened, I never
cried, I’ve never mourned and I’m not sure I
even know why.”

At the height of their success in the late
sixties, Sam & Dave reveled in their newfound
rock & roll excesses; women, drugs, custom-
ized planes and tour buses. Their success was
due in large part to the group’s unrivaled stage
show, where Moore and Prater — masters of
dynamics, of the quick stops and slow builds
and pregnant pauses and dramatic climaxes
from the bursting horn section of the Sam &
Dave Orchestra — dazzled and delighted, reign-
ing as the finest working old-school showmen
in pop music. It was Sam & Dave’s live act that
later served as the primary inspiration for the
Blues Brothers.

As the duo became increasingly popular,
Moore exploited Prater’s quiet disposition. “I
took advantage there because I felt that was a
weakness in Dave. I thrived on that weakness,”
he writes in An Oral History. “Years later, Dave
would say aloud that I felt like I was better than
him. Naturally, I denied it, but when you look
back, it was true.”

According to Moore, the duo’s relationship
became irreparably damaged after Prater shot
his girlfriend, Judith Gilbert.

One night in December 1969, Prater and Gil-
bert went to see a concert by Little Anthony and
the Imperials in Miami. When they returned
home. Prater, overcome with jealousy over what
he perceived as some sort of unfaithfulness ear-
lier that evening, retrieved his gun from the
bedroom and shot Gilbert in the head.

Gilbert, who survived the shooting, ended
up marrying Prater shortly after the incident,
and remained married to him for several more
years. “It was a very tumultuous, miserable,
surreal time for us,” said Kevin Gilbert, Ju-
dith’s son. In what has become arguably the
most famous quote ever uttered by either Sam
or Dave, Moore claims , in An Oral History, that
after the shooting he told Prater: “I’ll sing with
you, man, okay? I’ll sing with you. But I shall
not ever, ever again speak to you.”

The pair continued to work together on and
off throughout the seventies. As bookings
thinned out and the demand for soul and r&b
waned with the rise of disco, both men de-

veloped a dependence on cocaine and heroin.
“Dave took more dope than any other human I
ever personally witnessed,” the late Memphis
producer Jim Dickinson writes in his unpub-
lished memoir. The cover of Sam & Dave’s 1975
album Back at ’Cha captures them at the height
of their disorder: A tired-looking, full-bearded
Sam (“I’ve started wearing a beard now, ’cause
I’m ashamed,” Moore has said of the period)
is leaning on Dave, whose once-boyish, sweet
smile has turned sinister, almost maniacal. By
that point, because of contractual legalities,
Moore and Prater were no longer working with
Hayes and Porter at Stax. In the studio they
were directionless, recording standards like
“Under the Boardwalk” in a desperate search
for a comeback.

In 1977, Sam & Dave flew to England, where
they recorded one of their last singles. It was a
murky, soul-ballad rendition of Lennon and
McCartney’s “We Can Work It Out.” A few
years later, they broke up for good.

66 rp here are many songs where I’m supposed
X to be a shadow, a silvery edge around Paul
Simon’s lead front part, ” Art Garfunkel once
said. “I don’t care if it’s seven-eighths Paul and
one-eighth Arthur. Look how the silvery edge
makes the record work.”

Dave tried to play quarterback just once,
returning to Miami in 1971 after one of his
temporary breakups with Moore to record two
decent, if unremarkable, songs under his own
name. “They just put ’em out and that was that.
No promotion,” he said shortly after. “Keep
My Fingers Crossed,” the stronger of the two,
is a driving r&b number that tries too hard to
emulate Porter and Hayes’s Stax magic. The
next year. Prater was back singing with Moore.
Moore also had a tough time jump-starting his
solo career, recording a high-profile solo debut
for Atlantic Records that was thwarted when
the album’s producer. King Curtis, was mur-
dered in 1971.

Throughout the seventies, Moore and Prater
continued to rely on each other. David Por-
ter, in fact, vehemently disagrees with Steve
Alaimo’s ninety-to-ten assessment of Sam &
Dave. “He didn’t know what he had to work
with,” Porter said, getting audibly agitated.
“That’s a stupid comment. If he had known
what he had, he would not make a ludicrous
statement like that.”

During recording sessions. Porter would
stand on the other side of the microphone,
coaching Sam and Dave through their vocals. In
the mid-sixties, the recording techniques at Stax

were still rudimentary: mess up a take and you
had to start all over again. If you listen closely
enough to the first few seconds of Sam & Dave’s
“I Thank Yru, ” you’ll hear a faint voice shouting
“Yeah, baby! ” in the background. That’s David
Porter, so excited about the magic taking place
that he can’t keep his mouth shut.

“Dave knew how to make what he did com-
plement the effectiveness of what Sam would
do, ” Porter concluded. “There was a uniqueness
in Dave’s flavor that made Sam come off better.
And there was a specialness in Sam that made
Dave come off stronger. ”

Portertoldmethatrfhecould have done one
thing differently in his career, he would have
produced a solo album with Prater — let Dave
have the spotlight to himself. “Dave Prater has
never gotten the proper acknowledgment he
deserves. It was so obvious to me how great
of a talent he was, and that could have been
validated with the quality of that solo record.
That’s a missed opportunity that I wish I had
not missed.”

S ix days before he died, Dave Prater took the
stage for the last time. It was Easter Sunday
in Atlanta, and Dave was performing as part of
a Stax reunion concert alongside some of the
label’s biggest names from the sixties: Rufus
and Carla Thomas, William Bell, Eddie Floyd,
Johnnie Taylor, Isaac Hayes.

After the show. Prater was sitting around
backstage with some of the other artists. The
musicians all thought Dave, who performed
with Sam Daniels, had sounded great, as good
as ever, and they congratulated him for hanging
in through the years. One of those musicians
was Newt Collier, a trumpet player from the
original Sam & Dave Orchestra, who noticed
Prater quietly beginning to cry. “Everybody
was telling him how good he sounded, and he
just lost it, man,” Collier remembered. “He
couldn’t take it.”

Perhaps Prater was overcome by how well his
set had been received, that he had been recog-
nized, finally, by his contemporaries for having
contributed an awful lot to Sam & Dave’s music
after all. Maybe he was thinking about his old
partner then — noticeably absent from the bill
that night — whom he hadn’t seen in almost a
decade. Or maybe he just agreed with the critic
in the audience who wrote days later that Prater’s
voice “appeared to be shot” and his stage pres-
ence was “framed with apathy.”

Before anyone else could notice him getting
emotional, Prater stood up, without saying a
word, and walked away.

20 -

WINTER 2015

Old Crow Medicine Show at The Classic Center. Photo by Wingate Downs.

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— ©—

Little Graves
In Georgia

BY

CHRISTOPHER C. KING

O n Tuesday, August 17, 1915, the black
soil of Frey’s Grove in Marietta, Geor-
gia, became blacker after greedily lapping
up the blood that slowly trickled down the leg
of the recently lynched Leo Frank. A Jewish
businessman, educated in Brooklyn, Frank had
been found guilty two years before of murdering
Little Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old girl who
worked at his N ational Pencil Company factory in
Atlanta. After what could be regarded as the first
trial of the twentieth century that was wholly
propelled by the conjoined twin juggernauts of
political populism and media sensationalism,
Frank had been sentenced to death by hanging,
but this punishment had been reduced, upon
an appeal, to life behind bars. Shortly after this
commutation by Governor John M. Slaton, Frank
was rushed secretly to the Milledgeville prison,
flanked by a sheriff and two deputies. Even before
the decision was made to spare Frank, a violent
impulse of indignation and retribution had risen
from the white, mainly Protestant population in
and around Atlanta. Governor Slaton tasked a
special police detail with both protecting Frank
and detecting plots to exterminate him before he
could be transferred. But several weeks after his
transfer to the countryside jail and almost two
weeks before the rope was slipped over Frank’s
head, his neck was slit from left to right by a
vengeful fellow prisoner, almost severing the
trachea. The deeply sutured wound had almost
healed when Frank was seized from the prison
by an exceptionally weU-organized posse of Ku
BQux BClansmen — self-named “The Knights of
Mary Phagan.”

If a coroner was present among the “brave
and loyal men who took into their own hands
the execution of a law that had been stripped
from them, ” as the Atlanta Constitution proudly
reported the next day, the autopsy would have
likely determined the cause of death as one of
strangulation due to a hangman’s noose, not

by the profuse blood loss from the reopened
knife wound to the neck nor from the repeated
kicks to his head with cleated boots. Among
the “brave and loyal men” were doctors, former
governors and mayors, sheriffs, electricians,
preachers, telephone operators; a white-bread
“ A-Team” of Christian professionals with a tacit
mandate to assume the reigns of earthly justice.
As Frank’s body swung wildly from a branch
in Frey’s Grove — the childhood playground of
Little Mary Phagan — the tightly sewn wound
in his neck opened into a jagged gape, a yawn-
ing crimson bloom that was photographed and
reproduced widely. Images of his lynching were
sold in sets of picture postcards to the thousands
who thronged to the execution scene.

Death from strangulation, death from blood
loss, death from cerebral trauma — all of these
would have been superficial readings of Frank’s
life force being taken away. In truth, he was
killed neither by a man nor by the force of men.

He died in the raging flames of hatred and the
resulting smoke which obscured the impar-
tial vision of justice. A murder, a botched and
terribly obfuscated trial, and a tinder box of
xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and “white
rights” in post- Reconstruction Atlanta had re-
sulted in yet another murder, the creation of the
Anti-Defamation League, and the first strong
resurgence of a then-dormant Ku Klux Klan
since the group had disbanded in 1869. In this
time, frame-ups, coercion, forced confessions,
bribery, and political corruption came into sharp
focus for the “grift-ridden” people of Atlanta.
And it was all set to music.

B efore Georgia-born “Fiddlin’ John” Car-
son became the first “hillbilly” musician
ever to etch his playing onto the 78 rpm disc in
the South, which he did in Atlanta in June of
1923 (the Texas fiddlers A. C. “Eck” Robertson
& Henry C. Gilliland recorded exactly a year

22 -

WINTER 2015

“Lauren” (2013), by Frank Hamrick

earlier, but in New %rk City), he was known
as a high-profile entertainment fixture in the
city and the surrounding environs. In medieval
England he would have been regarded as the
court jester or the village idiot, depending upon
the status of the audience and the mood of the
ruler. Carson worked in the cotton and textile
mills of Atlanta until a union strike rendered
this stout linthead unemployable, and he turned
to music as a full-time profession. At the turn of
the century he became a bard skilled at extem-
porizing songs and rasping out melodic lines on
his fiddle in an archaic fashion that mimicked the
motions of chickens scratching for feed. What
he lacked in technical skill he compensated for
in roughly hewn yet evocative balladry.

Carson was in the forefront of composers and
pubhshers of contemporary murder ballads —
true crime tales rendered awkwardly, sometimes
artlessly, but with sweet sentimentality that were
then grafted onto a three-chord form. They were
not song-catchers. They were death-chasers. Any
event that claimed a life (or many lives) and was
receptive to a moral lesson (no matter how forced)
was fair game and fresh meat. And nothing was
fairer or fresher than Little Mary Phagan.

In the records we have describing the twenty-
five men who abducted and lynched Frank there
is no mention of Fiddlin’ John. However, he
must have been in the pocket of one of these
respected crackers, as he turned up almost im-
mediately after the press advanced upon Frey’s
Grove to witness their “reclaimedjustice.” He
wrote multiple songs about the case, in fact
“turned up with his fiddle at every Frank devel-
opment within a radius of thirty miles . . . since
the day Mary Phagan ’s body was discovered, ” as
the Atlanta Constitution reported in the August
1 8th, 1 9 1 5 , edition. That same article gives a rare
narrative of how music intersects with death;

“Fiddlin’ John” Carson swayed the crowds
when they were deprived of the picture of
the slain man swinging in the heart of the
woodland. “Fiddlin’ John” is a lanky moun-
taineer, who lacks a number of teeth, which
doesn’t seem to impair his vocal aspirations.

In his repertoire of folk songs, he has one
that is adapted to a quaint, rural hymn, and
has for its words a narrative of the murder
of Mary Phagan “by Leo Frank, the presi-
dent of the pencil factory.” “Fiddlin’ John”
would fiddle and sing his song in a typical
nasal twang, and he could be heard to the
center of the square, around which were
grouped hundreds of automobiles, buggies
and mountain transports of the “schooner”

variety, which were wagons covered with
canvas over arched framework. The crowd
would cheer and applaud him lustily, and,
inspired by this show of appreciation, he
would repeat his song, over and over again.
Presently, when his hearers began to tire
of the same tune, he deserted it, and re-
placed it with such well-known selections
as “Little Old Log Cabin By The Lane,”
“Annie Laurie,” “That Good Old-Time
Religion” and “Mr. Shirley, The Furniture
Man.” “Fiddlin’ John,” the troubadour of
the mountains, basked in “reflected glory,”
and it was not until the courthouse crowds
began to tire of his songs and fiddle that
he departed, reluctantly.

Despite onerous searches for printed lyrics of
the songs that Fiddlin’ John sang and no doubt
published, the only remains he with the 78 rpm
recordings made by Carson, his daughter Rosa
Lee, Vernon Dalhart, and one of John Carson’s
musical compatriots, Earl Johnson. Two songs
were composed by John Carson: “Little Mary
Phagan” was published in 1925 and “Grave of
Little Mary Phagan” was registered in 1917.
Based on the reportage of the Atlanta Constitu-
tion in 1915, Carson must have been singing the
crowds the version of “Little Mary Phagan” that
Rosa Lee recorded in 1925. Within the tight
confines of three minutes, she compresses the
twenty-seven months from Mary’s murder to
Frank’s condemnation:

Little Mary Phagan, she went to town one
day.

She went to the pencil factory to get her little
pay.

She left her home at eleven. She kissed her
mother goodbye.

Not one time did the poor child think she
was going there to die.

Leo Prank met her with a brutely heart we
know.

He smiled and said “Little Mary, now you’ll
go home no more. ”

He sneaked along behind her till she reached
the metal room.

He laughed and said “Little Mary, you ’ve
met your fatal doom. ”

As with any “folk art” rendering, the criti-
cisms are almost always from the outside, rarely
from within. A highfalutin Northerner would
point out that the rhymes are tortured, that
the environs of a pencil factory are difficult to

render in a lofty manner, and that the metrical
parsing of the verses is all wrong. But from the
inside, from the context where the song grew
from two pools of blood — Little Mary’s and also
Frank’s — the story holds together as does the
moral. The ballad conveys the whole narrative
but lacks the details. That is where the Devil is.

N owadays most historians agree that Frank
was innocent, that his trial was a pitiful
sham, and that the guilty verdict was an ex-
pediency designed to preserve the integrity of
the political powers in Atlanta. Someone had
to be found guilty, and without any irony, the
citizens of Georgia demanded an Old Testament
exchange of blood for blood. The broad details
of the crime allowed for such machinations.

Here are the fixed points in the narrative.
Thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan left her home
on Saturday morning, April 26, 1913, at 11:50
A.M. to collect her meager paycheck from the
pencil factory. It was Confederate Memorial
Day — a high holiday in the South. Around fif-
teen hours later, at 3 : 20 A.M. on Sunday, April
27, her body was discovered in the factory’s
dirt-floor basement. A rope was drawn tightly
around her neck and she had a deep gash on the
back of the head. Within twenty-four hours,
four suspects had been picked up: Newt Lee,
the black night watchman who discovered the
body; Arthur Mullinax, a streetcar conductor
who knew Little Mary; and John Gantt and
Gordon Bailey, former and current employees
of the National Pencil Company.

At the height of the initial roundup, Leo
Frank employed the Pinkerton Agency — a le-
gion of flat-footed and heavy-handed private
detectives who counted Dashiell Hammett as
one of their own — to assist the city policemen
with the murder investigation. This would ul-
timately prove to be an unwise move for Frank
since the district attorney and all the cronies in
the mayor’s office would interpret such a hiring
as a strategy to protect himself. As the private
detectives sought to collect evidence and gather
interviews that led suspicion away from Frank,
city officials began to worry that they might
have an unsolved crime on their hands — an
unwanted burden when elections were looming.

Thirty-six hours after the discovery of the
body, Leo Frank was arrested and charged on
suspicion of murder based almost solely on the
fact that he was one of the last people to see Little
Mary Phagan alive. There was and is no other evi-
dence that suggests Frank had anything to do with
her murder. Like a portentous dream from Aes-
chylus, one could perceive a rope slowly taking

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on corporeal form and dangling in a far-off tree.

Two days later, on Thursday, May the 1 st, this
shadowy noose tightened around Frank’s neck
when police also arrested James Conley, a black
janitor at the pencil factory. As Frank’s lawyers
had been illegally barred from the third-degree
interrogations of Conley and were never al-
lowed access to the results of these “interviews,”
it is impossible to verify the variety of changing
stories that James Conley presented to the po-
lice and the district attorney. We do know this:
Conley, who would also be tried, would move
back and forth between implicating himself and
impheating Frank, giving five different versions
of the event in affidavits. His Janus-faced story
hinged upon the existence of two bizarre notes
found with Mary Phagan’s body.

Handwritten with stubs of National Pencil
Company graphite, the short statements are
almost illegible and unintelligible. The first
reads, “That negro hired down here did this. He
pushed me down that hole. A long, tall, negro,
black, that did the work. Long, lean tall negro. I
write to people with me.” The second note reads,
“He said he wood love me and lay me down to
play. The night witch did it but that long tall
black negro boy did his self.” Naturally these
were not written by Phagan — a point belabored
by various handwriting experts brought into
the trial. Conley would assert at various times
that Frank transcribed these notes to him to put
blame on Newt Lee, the night watchman, or any
long, tall, black, lean negro other than himself.

One meaning of the term “wolf ticket” is a
false lead or a clue designed to throw off the
scent from the bloodhounds, to obfuscate a
true pursuit. The notes left with Little Mary’s
body are classic wolf tickets, but were eagerly
exploited by the prosecution against the de-
fenseless defense team. (Nathan Leopold and
Richard Loeb famously employed a similar wolf
ticket with their murder in 1924 of Little Robert
“Bobby” Franks. They typed a ransom note
after they had murdered Little Bobby in order
to hide their true motive — that as Nietzschean
Uhermenschen, they could kill with impunity
from an intellectual impulse.)

Very few minority communities in Atlanta
escaped the vindictive and suspicious eye of the
police, the mayor’s office, the loony detective
agencies, and the sensational newspapers during
the indictment, trial, and appeals of Frank. A Jew
of German descent and a black man were being
tried for a brutal murder. In the atmosphere of
Atlanta, anyone deemed “foreign” or non white
could be viewed as guilty by association. Jewish
businesses were shunned, if not publicly de-

nounced, German restaurants were boycotted,
and black neighborhoods were systematically
cordoned off and raided. Even the Greeks of At-
lanta were targeted. Demetris Vafiada, the city’s
Greek leader, complained about the implication
that the rope found tied around Mary Phagan’s
neck had been fashioned by a Greek because of
its unique knot. The small Greek citizenry of
Atlanta protested on Whitehall Street the day
after this nugget appeared in the Atlanta Journal.
This did little to undo the Gordian knot. It was
a bad time to not be a Scot-lrish ofay.

Political corruption, grift, and bribery were
so rife in Atlanta during the trial as to almost be
comical. Accusations and cross-accusations of
bribing witnesses, detectives, and officers were
cast about daily in all the local papers. Neighbors
of the Phagans even attempted to retain their own
lawyer to pursue more thoroughly a guilty con-
viction of Frank since the public fretted openly
that the fractures in the district attorney’s office
would cancel out the efforts of the prosecution.
However, the lawyer in question, Thomas B.
Felder, was so inept that he ended up being ac-
cused of bribing the bereaved parents of Little
Mary, an event that created a journalistic tsunami
in the May 25th, 1913, papers.

History places perhaps an unfathomable
chasm between the generations that lived within
a system of open racism and “fear of the other”
and the generations that follow, those who learn
about the experiences but never witnessed their
darkest depths. I recall in the now-fading Tech-
nicolor hues of the 1970s my brother being
horsewhipped on the street with a chestnut
brown leather belt, buckle gleaming gold in
the sun, by our grandfather — a Southerner who
would have followed the Mary Phagan murder
in the daily paper as a youth himself — for put-
ting his hand in a bag of potato chips that he
shared with a young black man. Fear of the black,
fear of the Northerner, fear of the “other” was
not merely programmed — it was instinctual,
primal, and native.

Even Little Mary’s corporeal remains suf-
fered. Her body was exhumed twice for further
forensic testing. But perhaps the greatest victim
of those two years was earthly justice — common
decency. Balance was not sought and equilibrium
was not maintained, neither by most of the
city officials nor by many of the citizens. The
political and judicial powers had tteV version of
the murder — they worried that this rich North-
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25 -

predator, could murder an innocent Southern
white Christian girl and get away with it due to
his connections with organizations established
north of the Mason-Dixon line.

The sad, predictable trope — the dichotomy
between the powers of Northern industrialism
pitted against the powers of Southern agrarian-
ism — claimed Frank as its victim and served as
an underpinning for all future bloodletting.
Once these Atlantans determined that they
could make James Conley tell their version,
Leo Frank was doomed and no other suspect or
story would suffice. Though he would be found
guilty, sentenced to death, appeal his sentence,
and be granted commutation, in the end he had
to be consumed by the earth — the people of
Atlanta had cried out for blood and they saw
Frank as the only suitable sacrifice.

T he May 15th, 1913, edition of the Atlanta
Constitution contained a discovery, a nascent
theory that never took root. Perhaps the pros-
ecution cast it aside since it muddied the waters
of the case against Frank. Maybe the mayor or
the Pinkerton Agency or any of the dozens of
people who had their hands in the pot decided
that it was irrelevant . The headline read : victim
OF MURDER PREPARED TO DIE. The article focused
on a slip of paper found inside of Little Mary
Phagan s metal pocketbook — a small satchel that
she carried with her at all times except for that
fateful morning. On this tiny note was written
“April 20, 1913 — My name is Mary Phagan. 1
live at 146 Lindsey Street, near Bellwood and
Ashby Streets.” Solicitor Hugh M. Dorsey be-
lieved that folded piece of paper implied that
“she had already been threatened with death
or had a premonition of an early demise.” He
stated for the record:

Looks as though she expected an accident of
some kind. By George ! She must have. This
slip was written only six days before she
was killed on Confederate Memorial Day.

Perhaps briefly, solicitor Dorsey entertained
the notion of an alternative explanation, a dif-
ferent killer with a different motive. Possibly
he even realized that Frank had no motive, no
reason to kill Little Mary Phagan or anyone else.
A reason: it helps to have one.

Although forensic science was still in its in-
fancy, the two coroners. Dr. Hurt and Dr. Harris,
did maintain that Little Mary Phagan had not
been sexually violated prior to her death. There-
fore, rape was not a motive. Further, the $ 1 .20
pay that Mary collected was no reason for her

murder. Everything rested upon James Conley s
coached testimony. It was enough for the jury
to convict Frank of the crime that “startled the
entire Southland.”

Part of seeing anything is apperceiving that
which is not present — everything has a context
and flow just as our actions have a meaning, ei-
ther explicit or tacit. That Frank had no reason
to murder Little Mary Phagan mattered little to
the court. He was painted as a one-dimensional
caricature, a beast of wantonness with “abnor-
mal” desires. Conley testified that Frank made
him write those notes and move the body to the
basement. For his admission as an accessory to the
crime Conley served only a year in jail. Almost
seven decades after the trial, Alonzo Mann, at
the time of the murder just a fourteen-year-old
employee of the pencil factory, gave a sworn state-
ment that he saw Conley drag Little Mary Phagan
to the basement. This testimony by Mann, along
with the Anti-Defamation League s constant pres-
sure to characterize Frank s trial as unfair, led to a
posthumous pardon of Frank in 1986.

Frank never confessed, not in court nor in
the minutes before he was strung up by the
Ku Klux Klan. As I read descriptions of the
scene immediately after he was lynched, my
mind went back (or perhaps it went forward) to
the aftermath of the Charlie Lawson murders.
On Christmas Day 1929, outside of Danbury,
North Carolina, Lawson killed his wife and
six of his seven children (aged seventeen years
to four months) before shooting himself. No
note was left behind and no one could advance
a theory as to why he did it. Just as the crowd
rushed under the oak tree in Frey’s Grove to pull
at Leo Frank’s tattered clothes , to tear away but-
tons, shoes, tufts of hair, most of his nose, so too
did the “morbidly curious” snatch raisins from a
cake baked by Charlie Lawson’s wife, untouched
since that Christmas morning. Everyone wanted
to have a memento mori, either out of fear or out
of vengeance. And, as with Little Mary Phagan,
a murder ballad grew from the blood of the slain
Lawson family and was performed extensively
in North Carolina.

This murder, like so many violent crimes,
was labeled “senseless” (later it was revealed
that Lawson’s oldest daughter had told her best
friend that she was pregnant with her father’s
child and that both her mother and father knew
the truth — a reason in this case). But after we
wrestle with the “senselessness” in which these
things occur, something curious emerges from
within us, something which could very well
be weaved into our way of negotiating with
the world. Our mind moves from that which

is senseless to that which is sensical. What is
bewildering eventually becomes comprehen-
sible, primarily because we uncover the motive
or the motives for a killing.

Perhaps these old murder ballads serve a
deeper function, to help us traverse the liminal
stage between the inexplicable and the under-
standable — much in the way that the older, more
elaborate and lengthy periods of mourning help
ease us from the acknowledgement of death to
the finality of burial. There is a shared misery,
a communal notion of lamentation contained
within Carson’s ballad:

The astonished asked the question, the angels
they did say.

Why he killed little Mary Phagan upon
one holiday.

Come all of you good people, wherever you
may he.

Supposing little Mary belonged to you or me?

W ho killed Little Mary Phagan? Can any
sense be made one hundred years after
the murders of both Phagan and Frank? Conley
cleaned up the mess so that he wouldn’t get
in trouble. But why frame Frank then? Per-
haps someone close to Mary, her stepfather or
a relative, had carnal knowledge of the young
girl and threatened her life. It is the case that
J. W. Coleman, her stepfather, first suggested
that Newt Lee, the black night watchman, was
the murderer. We do not know, for instance, if
Coleman was interrogated, if he had anything
approaching an alibi, or if he knew Conley prior
to the murder. It could have been the perfect
frame-up. Perfect sense.

Not far from the prison in Milledgeville
where Frank was seized was someone who had
a seamless answer for the senselessness of it all.
In a world where a burning bush symbolized
both a covenant and a power outside of the cor-
poreal sphere, where a man would sacrifice his
son to prove his loyalty to his God, and where
“Jesus thrown everything off balance,” Flan-
nery O’Connor would likely point to our fall
from grace as the underpinning for all this evil.

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor
paints the senselessness vividly as a whole fam-
ily is offed by The Misfit and his gang during a
vacation drive. The Misfit is part me, part you,
part everyone. We wrestle with what is under-
standable, what is inexplicable, what is right and
what is unjust and we are no wiser than when
we started out. The Misfit says, “Does it seem
right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap
and another ain’t punished at all?” “if

26 -

WINTER 2015

o

Don’t You
Remember a
Comedy Song?

BY

JEWLY MIGHT

R ay Stevens is a slippery one. He’ll don
an endless succession of zany personas,
then suddenly play it straight and savvy
when you least expect it. In the music video
for “The Streak” he’s all over the place, making
his entrance as a voluble TV news reporter,
chasing down the scoop on a flashing incident
at the local Bi-Rite. He shoves a microphone
(unplugged) in the face of a colorful character
(Ray Stevens, again) — a slack-jawed, hayseed
bystander sporting a bright yellow Caterpillar
cap — whose wife, Ethel, has just been scandal-
ized by the buck-naked man racing down the
jams and jellies aisle. A third Stevens, playing
a grocer in an apron and bow tie, picks up the
story from there, contributing a deliberately
hammy vocal performance.

After the song concludes with a scene in a
college basketball gym, Stevens slips out of
character. Then he breaks the fourth wall. Into
the shot huffs a dour, priggish, business-suited
woman, a representative of the Department of
Standards and Practices, who scolds, “Once
again, Mr. Stevens, you have managed to —
pardon the expression — barely stay within the
bounds of what is permissible.” An impish
Stevens waits a beat, then tugs the hayseed’s
cap back on at a crooked angle and summons a
doltish drawl: “Yeauuuh, Uh did.” He mugs for
the camera, cutting his eyes to the side with a
lopsided grin, his expression signaling that he
knows exactly what he’s doing: championing
his resolutely silly, lowbrow humor in the
face of more buttoned-up sensibilities — and
doing it at his own expense, for his audience’s
benefit. He’s making sure they feel like they’re
in on the joke.

In the early nineties, I watched “The Streak”
and the rest of Stevens’s Comedy Video Classics
compilation pretty much every time I visited my
paternal grandparents in their decaying North

Carolina town. My cousins, my sister, and I
would inevitably go stir-crazy looking for things
to do, so somebody would grab the tape from
a shelf in the closet, where it sat next to Sister
Act and Prancer, and shove it into the V CR. We
kids would plop ourselves down on the plaid
sofa, flanked by Papa in his recliner, spitting
Red Man into an empty soup can, and watch
Stevens clowning on the screen. By the time
I became a preteen, I wanted to believe I was
too cool for his comball humor, but the antics
entertained me in spite of myself. Stevens was
our down-home, living-room jester.

Years later, after I became a music journal-
ist, I’d see Stevens mentioned as a footnote to
career histories of Nashville icons like Dolly

Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Fred Foster, Chet
Atkins, and Roger Miller. In 2010, the Country
Music Hall of Fame and Museum spotlighted
his work as a piano-playing side man. Long
before that, he’d been inducted into the Nash-
ville Songwriters Hall of Fame. These were no
trivial accomplishments. I began to reevaluate.
Maybe there was more to Ray Stevens than
I’d realized.

T he headquarters for Ray Stevens Music
stands at the corner of Grand Avenue and
Music Square West on Nashville’s rapidly
gentrifying Music Row. From the outside, the
building could pass for a tidy doctor’s office
ringed in manicured shrubbery, but inside, it

Photograph by Mike Smith. Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art

OxfordAmerican.org

127 -

houses all of Stevens’s business and creative
operations, including two separate recording
studios.

In lieu of a receptionist — Stevens doesn’t
currently employ one — the door buzzer sum-
moned his tall, jolly right-hand man. Buddy
Kalb. The boss, Kalb informed me, was at an
actual doctor’s office. He offered to give me a
tour of the premises. Just inside the door and
throughout the building were rugs bearing
Stevens’s Clyde Records logo, a camel silhouette
with palm trees in the background. (It looks
virtually identical to the Camel cigarettes logo,
except the animals face in different directions.)
We wound our way down hallways, past open
office doors, through a handsomely appointed
lounge, and into the “big studio.”

“This is the step where Tammy Wynette
broke her arm,” Kalb cautioned, alluding to an
incident that predated Stevens’s ownership. The
space was prepped for Stevens to work. Song
charts were piled next to the mixing console,
and an array of keyboard instruments — pianos
of grand and electric varieties, a Fender Rhodes
organ — stood at the ready.

The path to the smaller studio cut through
rooms lined with cardboard boxes of CDs,
DVDs, and Stevens’s hardcover memoir, part
of the mail-order operation he’s had going for
close to a quarter-century. This studio was
crammed with racks of costumes from vid-
eos — like the plush, pillowy muscle suit he
wore in “Gitarzan” — and mounds of props.
There was a treasure chest from “The Pirate
Song.” A knight’s shield from the album cover
of Surely You Joust. A red, adult-size tricycle
left over from his years in Branson, Missouri,
Las Vegas of the Midwest.

Stevens is impressively industrious at age
seventy-six. He’s developing a television show
and gearing up to build an entertainment com-
plex just outside Nashville that will house
both a Vegas-style supper club (the Stevens-
designed CabaRay) and his new offices and
studios. Blueprints were spread across his
desk. When he strode in, he looked ready
for the dinner crowd: dark jeans, loafers, a
sport coat, and a red pocket square, his face
framed by the same well-groomed beard he’s
been wearing for decades. He settled into a
chair with an air of purpose, ready to get down
to the business of responding to questions,
not to mention impatient to break ground on
his new venue. “We’re kinda at the mercy of
the permits people down at metro codes,” he
said. “But we’re getting bids on building it.
So as soon as my architect gets back from vaca-

tion. ...” Stevens trailed off and eyeballed the
blueprints. “He’s got another week.”

T hough his dad spent his working life in textile
mills and impressed upon his son the value
of anhonest day’s wage, Ray Ragsdale, as Stevens
was known in childhood, was more or less raised
to perform — not through some passing-down of
picking skills, but through formal instruction.
While the Ragsdale family made a home in tiny
Clarkdale, Georgia (where Stevens was bom in
1939), then moved to slightly more bustling
Albany (in 1949), and finally Atlanta (in 1956),
his mom kept him in piano lessons starting at
age six and insisted that he plant himself at the
keyboard at least an hour each day. He picked up
clarinet, trumpet, tuba, and dmms in the school
band program, and started a teen pop combo that
played school dances.

He got his first chance to try to prove his sing-
ing and songwriting potential to somebody in
the business when his Sunday school teacher,
also a radio DJ, introduced him to Bill Lowery,
an Atlanta-based music publisher, label head,
and all-around entrepreneur. Lowery asked to
hear a song, and Stevens wouldn’t settle for a
make-do demo session in his bedroom or garage.
Already he thought like a record man; he was
after a particular, popular, reverb-bathed sound.
Since those were more permissive times, he had
no trouble convincing his school principal to
fork over the keys to Druid HiUs High for the
weekend so that he could record the first song
he’d ever written, the doo-wop ditty “Silver
Bracelet.”

Lowery made “Silver Bracelet” into a minor
regional hit and encouraged his young protege,
by then billed as Ray Stevens, to continue his
formal musical education, including three years
of music theory at Georgia State. Stevens gained
valuable experience writing, recording, and pro-
ducing for Lowery’s National Recording Gom-
pany, alongside Kalb and guitarist-songwriter
Jerry Reed, later of Smokey & the Banditf^me.
At the time, Stevens liked to experiment in the
studio and was taken with the popular youth
music of the day. It was hardly a given that half
a century later he would come to be seen as a
novelty act, indeed, as one of modem country
music’s foremost jokesters.

His piano playing took cues from the dash-
ing syncopation of Ray Charles, and his early
songwriting hewed to a popular, clowning
hybrid of r&b and rock & roll, following on
the heels of such late-fifties smashes as Sheb
Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater” and the
Goasters’ “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” and

“Along Came Jones” (some of which Stevens
would go on to record). It wasn’t lost on Stevens
that these colorful, cartoonish song subjects
and playful performances, often incorporat-
ing theatrical sound effects, were gargantuan
crowd-pleasers. Charming a crowd was exactly
what he wanted to do, so he learned the tricks
of the entertainer’s trade: make it catchy and
culturally resonant. He wrote a rock & roll song
riffing on the sort of dubious health remedies
that’d been hawked to minstrel show, radio,
and television audiences dating back to Crazy
Water Crystals. With its drolly exaggerated yet
familiar-sounding claims, Stevens’s “Jeremiah
Peabody’s Polyunsaturated Quick Dissolving
Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple
Pills” landed on the pop chart, exactly as he
had hoped.

Besides keeping Stevens busy in Atlanta,
Lowery occasionally sent him to record in
Nashville. After Stevens signed with Mercury
Records there, he was offered a label gig plus a
guarantee of session work. He and his young
wife. Penny Jackson, moved to Nashville in
1962. Their one-bedroom apartment was so
cramped that their infant daughter, Timi Lyrm,
had to sleep in a dresser drawer, and Stevens
felt a pressing need to deliver a hit that would
enable them to upgrade their living situation.
Late one night he came up with the idea of
spinning One Thousand and One Nights, the
collection of Middle Eastern folk tales better
known to American readers as Arabian Nights,
into the utterly goofy, jive-talking “ Ahab the
Arab, ” during which he bellowed in imitation
Arabic and brayed like a daft donkey.

“1 think what attracted me to the idea,” he
wrote in his memoir, Ray Stevens’ Nashville,
“was that 1 could make weird noises. I didn’t
know what a camel sounded like so I made up
a sound that turned out to be right.”

The song became a Top 5 pop smash. It is a
composition of its time, though Stevens bristles
at the notion that many contemporary ears can’t
help but hear reductive, or even racist, under-
tones.

“So 1 wrote this song about a guy that’s gonna
mess around with one of the sultan’s most valu-
able harem girls, and gets away with it,” he told
me in his office. “Now a lot of people think it’s
politically incorrect, but 1 cannot for the life of
me figure out how they came to that conclusion,
because there’s nothing political about it. It’s
just a funny song.”

Even with a few novelty hits under his belt
in the sixties, Stevens’s professional future was
still wide open. His skill set was as diverse as any

28 -

WINTER 2015

musician’s in town. He alternated between co-
medic material and more serious-minded songs
and picked up work playing piano and singing
on Nashville recording sessions, doing complex
arrangements of strings and horns, and handling
A&R for record labels; he’d find material for
artists to sing and get them ready to record it,
tasks he performed for Dolly Parton when she
was new to town.

An early appreciator of Kris Kristofferson’s
literary knottiness, Stevens beat Johnny Cash to
the eloquently wasted “Sunday Mornin’ Com-
ing Down.” (Stevens recorded it in 1969, a year
before Cash took it to No. 1 .) So committed was
Stevens to his interpretation of the song that he
spent countless studio hours tweaking it. While
preparing for its release as a single, he turned
down a little number Burt Bacharach and Hal
David wanted him to record for Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid — which is why the world
knows “Raindrops Keep Failin’ on My Head”
as a B. J. Thomas song.

Stevens framed “Sunday Mornin’” in grand,
glistening orchestration and sang it with gentle
vibrato, the ruefulness of his delivery edged
in articulate warmth. But it was — he was, he’s
said — a bit too “white bread” for the confessions
of a hungover bohemian. He saw his rendition
tank, only to watch Cash come along and score
a major hit with the song. Stevens’s younger
daughter, Suzi Ragsdale, who’s a singer-song-
writer herself, affirms on the phone: “Yeah, he
thought Johnny Cash was so successful with
‘Sunday Mornin” because people could see him
drinkin’ beer for breakfast.”

Cash was known to dabble in humor himself
(see: “A Boy Named Sue”), to say nothing of
his heartfelt gospel material, but he frequently
aligned himself with rough-and-tumble char-
acters, boasting of their exploits in his songs,
putting on concerts behind prison walls, and,
when in the throes of addiction, living as hard
as they did. With his sense of musical play and
eager, polished showmanship, Stevens never
conformed to the model of daringly dark artistry
that’s been idealized from privileged perches
throughout the rock era and beyond.

Sitting across from him, 1 floated the idea that
he’s always come off as being more congenially
mischievous than cool and dangerous.

“Oh, I’m not cool and dangerous?” he chuck-
led.

1 changed tack. “Do you feel like your career
has earned you the reputation you wanted?”

“1 hadn’t thought about that,” he said. “It’s
not up to me to voice an opinion on that, because
I’m too close to the trees to see the forest. I’m

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not in any way aggrieved or disappointed by
how I am perceived, because I am what I am and
there’s nothing I can do about it. I mean, there
is something that we can all do about it — we can
do the best we can. But as far as entertaining and
writing and being in the music business, I really
have no role as far as my reputation.”

“Put it this way,” I said. “Have you ever felt
underappreciated?”

“Do you think I’m underappreciated?” he
tossed back, unwiUing to budge, but not unkind.
I said I wasn’t sure.

“That sounds like sour grapes to me, and 1
don’t deal in sour grapes.”

S ince Stevens more or less fought me to a
standstill when I tried talking to him about
perceptions of his music, I turned to his long-
time acquaintance Don Cusic, a professor of mu-
sic business at Nashville’s Belmont University.

“In this day and time, an artist is supposed to
write in order to be authentic, and the writing
is supposed to be self-expression: This really
happened to me, or These are my deepest feelings, ”
Cusic told me over the phone. “And Ray’s not
like that. Ray’s from that old school of what
works. Those guys thought of the audience.
WiU the audience like it?”

Cusic added that he’s trying to help Stevens
get into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “Com-
edy is more important in the history of country
music — in the history of recordings — than it’s
given credit for.”

People do tend to overlook the wit and skill
involved in country comedy, presuming it re-
quires nothing more than a cheap set of pros-
thetic Billy Bob teeth. Really, though, there
was down-home virtuosity in the performances
of Grandpa Jones, Minnie Pearl, and plenty
of the other long-running characters on Hee
Haw: a mastery and magnification of the ca-
dences of vernacular speech; an upending of
elitism; a strong grasp of situational comedy,
glorious absurdity, and knowing caricature.
Often there were first-rate, playfully deployed
musical chops.

Long before Weird A1 Yankovic became the
reigning pop parodist, Stevens was goofing on
familiar pop songs. In his hands, the Gleim Mill-
er big band standard “In the Mood” became a
cacophony of swinging, clucking hens (credited
to the Henhouse Five Plus Two). When he did
his first interpretation of a Kristofferson song
since “Sunday Momin’ Coming Down,” he
dispensed with emotionalism and gave a silly
reading to the sensual plea, “Help Me Make It
Through the Night. ” Roughly fifty seconds into

the track, the performance pivots from inflated
countrypolitan finesse to hillbilly slapstick.

“That was on that video we sold on TY ” noted
Stevens, gesturing toward the cover of Comedy
Video Classics hanging on his office wall. (It’s
emblazoned with a still photo from the end of
“The Streak,” with Stevens bugging his eyes
and showing his tongue.) “Sold five million.”
Stevens’s words bear no trace of regret. If any-
thing, he’s proud. Defiant even. He found his
audience, he made them laugh, and he has the
numbers and plaques to prove it.

Stevens released Comedy Video Classics,
his collection of eight music videos, in 1992.
Besides the Kristofferson number and “The
Streak, ” the titles include one of my personal
favorites — “Mississippi Squirrel Revival” (the
story of a rodent sparking a charismatic awak-
ening in the First Self-Righteous Church) —
and the lewd phone call escapade, “It’s Me
Again, Margaret.” Perusing online customer
reviews confirms that I’m not the only one
with memories of multigenerational view-
ing. As a buyer recalled on Amazon: “2 of
my grandchildren grew up watching this and
laughing their heads off.”

Stevens, Kalb, and the rest of their team origi-
nally manufactured the videocassettes as a merch
item to sell at Stevens’s Branson shows, then
ventured into hawking them through vociferous
television ads. Now, for the first time, you can see
eight of bis greatest, funniest hits! the aimouncer
crowed in the sixty-second cut. You get it all
on one hilarious VHS videotape! All that was
required was a toll-free call and $19.95, plus
$4.50 for shipping and handling.

The As Seen on TV approach carried with it a
certain down-market connotation, the decidedly
elitist notion that it was only unsophisticated
products that got the fast-talking, low-budget,
small-screen pitch. But Stevens didn’t sweat the
possibility that the ad campaign might devalue
his music in anyone’s eyes. “1 don’t think about
selling music to people who are that prudish,”
he scoffed with a smile. “If you have the music
people warma buy, it doesn’t really matter where
they’re exposed to it.”

These days, many of his fans are exposed to
his music on YouTube. His intense displeasure
with the current administration’s policies has
become one of his primary songwriting themes,
as evidenced by many of his more recent up-
loads. Green-screen music videos with defiant
titles like “Y)u Didn’t Build That,” “Obama
Budget Plan,” and “If Yru Like Your Plan” seem
to outnumber goofball efforts like “Taylor Swift
Is Stalkin’ Me.”

Suzi Ragsdale acknowledged, “Some of ’em
are a little more political than I would ever per-
form myself.” (She’s more in step with the folkie
storytelling tradition, having sung alongside
respected singer-songwriters like Guy Clark,
Darrell Scott, and her ex-husband, Verlon
Thompson.) “He’s gotten into that right-wing
stuff pretty heavy, and he’s got a whole fan
base from that. 1 just stay out of any political
discussions, but I really enjoy that he can make
his statement and still be fun and funny and
kinda lighthearted.”

Stevens’s biggest comedy collection to date
took an entirely different form than his video
classics. He spent the better part of two years
selecting and recording 108 novelty songs,
plenty from various eras of his own catalog, as
well as a slew of oddball sixties pop hits, pre-
electric hillbilly rube numbers, parodies, and
more. They’re all collected in his Encyclopedia
of Recorded Comedy Music, released in 2012.
None of it is the least bit bawdy. He said, “I
was just going straight down the middle: fam-
ily audience.”

To go with the music, he compiled informa-
tion on each song’s authors and original perform-
ers for an accompanying booklet and commis-
sioned a short essay on the history of comedy
music from Cusic, who rightly points out that
Stevens’s writing and arranging prowess has led
to some musically sophisticated comedy cuts.

In the booklet, Stevens lays out his agenda:
“I would love for people ... to understand that
humor is often more memorable and ultimately
more important in a listener’s life than some
sappy love song.”

In person, he doubled down on his defense of
the cultural importance of furmy music. “Don’t
you remember a comedy song?” he prodded. “I
mean, it’ll just leap into your mind quicker, most
times, than a love song. Sure, it depends on the
song, but just because it’s a comedy song doesn’t
mean it’s here today, gone tomorrow.” He had a
point; his funny material has stuck with me for
more than twenty years.

Regardless of what he said about his reputa-
tion being out of his hands, with the box set
Stevens made a canny argument for attribut-
ing aesthetic and cultural value to his music.
The fact that he titled it an “encyclopedia,”
and treated it as a hefty research and recording
project, suggests that he’d like to enjoy greater
respect for the sillier side of his life’s work,
and the comedic tradition of which he’s a part.
“Every university should have one,” he said of
his nine-disc behemoth. It sounded like he was
only half-kidding.

30 -

WINTER 2015

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32 -

Photo of Fletcher Henderson courtesy of Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo

by Cynthia Shearer

J azz owes its origins
to the bump and
grind of turn-of-
the-century broth-
els and the colored
waif orphanages of
the South’s great
cities, but where is
the wellspring of swing? If you say Chicago, the
answer is no. Benny Goodman would be the first
to tell you so.

The fountainhead of swing, children, is a little
white frame house with a tin roof, on the black
side of the tracks in Cuthbert, a red-dirt Georgia
cotton-gin town. This is where they used to
lock Fletcher Henderson in the parlor with a
piano, beginning about 1903 when he was six.
If he didn’t practice, he got whipped. He was a
sweet-faced child, with his mother’s light skin
and his father’s old eyes. Sometimes the house
grew quiet and Fletcher curled up on the floor
to take a nap. Even at an early age, he showed
signs of what the great white jazz mahout John

Hammond would one day call “lassitude.”

Fletcher was bom with the burden of perfect
pitch. Whatever the boy heard, he heard as mu-
sic. A commotion of younger siblings with the
chickens in a swept-earth yard. An arpeggio of
rose thorns scraping on the mailbox. A cadence of
mule-trot through an open window. Henderson’s
parents were the salt of the earth and the sugar,
too, but they decreed there would be no music
under their roof on Andrew Street that did not
dignify the lives of black people. No blues, no
degrading coon songs, no ham fat.

The Henderson family piano is a venerable old
beauty, now enshrined in the Amistad Collec-
tion in New Orleans. It is carved mahogany, an
upright model with brass pedals, purchased from
Philhps and Crew on Peachtree Street in Atlanta
for $275, payable in monthly installments of
SlO. Professor F. H. Henderson, Fletcher’s father,
signed that contract on September 25, 1906,
the day after the Atlanta Race Riot, when poor
whites attacked, burned, and looted middle-
class black neighborhoods and businesses. The

contract allowed Fletcher’s schoolmaster father
to skip the payments in summers, when he had
no salary coming in. Professor Henderson’s credo
was “I never drink, smoke, or dissipate in any
manner,” but he wagered all he owned for that
piano. He mortgaged his house to pay off the
piano note. Music would be the mighty fortress
to keep his children safe.

N obody had a clue that in the future,
Fletcher Henderson’s raids against the
precepts of ragtime and “sweet” white
dance music would someday make everybody tap
their toes, from the starched-shirt demagogues
down south, who hired him to play their cot-
ton carnivals, to the bootleggers in bulletproof
Duesenbergs up north, who hired him to play in
their plantation-themed dens of iniquity, to most
of our great-gartered grandmothers, packing
flasks in Prohibition speakeasies or shimmying
in secret along to the radio.

Professor F. H. Henderson had been born a
slave. By the time Fletcher came along, his father
was a towering figure in Negro education in
Georgia, the principal and Latin master of the
Howard Normal School, a model Negro training
institute. Fletchers grandfather, James Hen-
derson, also an emancipated slave, had fought
unsuccessfully in the South Carolina legislature
for written contracts and a living wage for black
men. He had witnessed widespread violence by
whites and assassinations of blacks who had been
elected to public offices in Newberry County
in 1868.

The Cuthbert of Fletcher Henderson s youth
lynched black men at a rate slightly higher than
other Georgia towns, at a time when Georgia
was topping the lists they were keeping over at
Tuskegee. Professor Henderson was a deacon at
the Payne Chapel A.M.E. church, which stood
like a sentry tower by the railroad tracks, the
line of demarcation between black Cuthbert and
the sometimes volatile whites on the other side.
His house was across the street from the church.
He apparently served as a mediator between the
white and black communities.

When Fletcher was bom in 1 897, people were
still talking about a manhunt the year before and
the men who were lynched by mistake. When
Fletcher was nine, someone tried to burn down
his fathers school a few days before a “private”
hanging of a black man named Will Price, con-
victed of the rape of a white girl. In 1909, when
Fletcher was eleven, a black man named Albert
Reese was taken forcibly from the Cuthbert jail
by a masked mob of fifteen “unknown parties”
and hung from a pine tree west of town, right
where the Central Railroad crossed the “public
road,” within sight of the Payne Chapel A.M.E.
church, or a few hundred yards over on what is
now U.S. Highway 82.

If you push one pin into a map for every lynch-
ing in Fletcher Henderson’s comer of Georgia
during his childhood and youth, it looks like
the furies left behind a dark spray of buckshot.
We get some hints about those times for the
Henderson family in the professor’s obituary
in the Atlanta Daily World many years later:
“His sober judgment and influence saved many
a Negro from the lynch noose.”

In 1911, the family put thirteen-year-old
Fletcher on a train to attend high school in the
city. For eight years, Atlanta University would
be his safe harbor. The plan was not foolproof : in
late September 1 9 1 6 , a few days before Fletcher’s
freshman year started at the university, two more
black men were accused of murder and promptly
lynched without trial in Cuthhert, just on the

other side of the tracks from the Hendersons’
home and church.

At Atlanta, Fletcher Henderson had freedoms
that could get him in serious trouble back in
Cuthbert. He had white classmates and white
teachers, some female. He ate meals with white
people. He skipped the music curriculum but
studied Greek and elocution. He swept floors
to help pay his expenses. He studied chemistry,
lettered in baseball and football, was a Big Man
on Campus with the ladies, and belonged to
Alpha Phi Alpha, WE.B. Du Bois’s fraternity.
He was the university organist.

By 1915, Henderson was taking the train
north every summer to play piano at the Broad-
water resort in Woods Hole, Massachusetts,
owned hy one of the white Atlanta University
faculty. Miss Annie A. Bowman. She is most
likely the attractive dark-haired woman who
figures prominently in a remarkable collection
of photos in a scrapbook from Fletcher’s college
days.

In one snapshot, we see Fletcher as a shy-
looking young man in tweeds contemplating
seashells from atop a craggy constellation of
rocks. In another, he stands on the bow of a
docked sailboat, his hand on the mast, holding
eye contact with the photographer, possibly
the white Miss Bowman herself. Possibly she is
the woman in another image wearing a modern
white lawn dress, with pearls and heels, with
what looks like Fletcher’s shadow in the left
foreground. If this is she, then Annie Bowman
is one of the unsung heroines of American music
history. She gave Fletcher Henderson a place to
mix ragtime and Rachmaninoff during some of
America’s bloodiest summers, when the bottom-
feeder caste of whites down south were getting
all liquored up and looting and burning entire
black communities, blowing into their whiskey
jugs and calling it music.

His senior year in college, Fletcher was intro-
duced to another important influence. Professor
Kemper Harreld, a Morehouse College music
professor whose specialty was classical compos-
ers who cribbed from folk music. Harreld was a
striking figure in a woolen coat and bowler hat,
the musical director of a travehng racial uplift
pageant. The Open Door, a gorgeous, allegorical
production using pantomimes, lavish costumes,
choirs, and a tiny orchestra, with graduating
senior Fletcher Henderson on piano . In the 1 9 1 9
version of The Open Door, Fletcher played Ed-
ward German’s “Torch Dance” paired with the
black composer Nathaniel Dett’s “Juha Dance.”
Other pieces in Henderson’s Open Door reper-
toire: Rachmaninoffs “Prelude in C# Minor,”

Offenbach’s “Barcarolle,” Delibes’s “Pizzicati,”
and Grieg’s “Canon.” Their first performance was
in the cavernous Atlanta Auditorium Armory.
Then they took the show on the rough roads to
Macon and Savannah. In the college yearbook, a
classmate wrote that the world would someday
know Fletcher Henderson’s name.

After graduation in 1920, Henderson took
a train to New Tbrk with his diploma in hand,
ready to serve humanity in a laboratory. White
humanity in New Tbrk, it turns out, preferred to
be served by black sleeping-car porters, butlers,
chauffeurs, bellhops, or musicians on riverboats.
No problem: American music became Hender-
son’s lab and popular songs his experiments. He
subbed for a roommate as a pianist on a riverboat,
and met his future wife, Leora Meaux, a pretty
trumpet player from Louisville. He worked as a
song-plugger for W C. Handy and Harry Pace,
an Atlanta University graduate. Whatever blues
he’d missed out on in Cuthbert, he got back in
spades in that job.

When Pace decamped to start the first all-black
recording company. Pace Phonograph Corpora-
tion, Fletcher went with him. Their label was
Black Swan, and their concept was historic: let
black people record and sell their own music
without forcing them into commercial hokum
stereotypes. Fletcher was going head to head
with seasoned white talent hunters and pro-
ducers at established companies like Okeh and
Paramount. By 1921, he was auditioning sing-
ers and choosing what and whom Black Swan
would record.

In its short life, Black Swan was a source of
great pride to American blacks. White record
companies didn’t appreciate the competition,
and someone put a bomb in the coal order for
the Black Swan pressing plant. Records by black
opera singers or Marcus Garvey’s pianist didn’t
sell well, but those by lissome young female
blues chanteuses did. When Fletcher accompa-
nied Ethel Waters on “Down Home Blues” and
“Oh Daddy,” Black Swan had a runaway hit, and
Waters and Harry Pace made a lot of money. Pace
decided to send Waters, Fletcher, and a small
orchestra, the Black Swan Troubadours, on an
extended tour, beginning late autumn of 1921.

it it it

P ush one pin into a map for every stop the
Black Swan troupe made in the dying days
of vaudeville and you see more than a ran-
dom chitlin’ circuit tour. Early on, Pace sent in
a new manager, Lester Walton, whose resume
included management of Harlem’s Lafayette

34 -

WINTER 2015

Theatre and a transatlantic voyage on behalf of
President Woodrow Wilson to report on the
morale of black soldiers fighting in World War I.
After stops to support the NAACP s full-court
press to get the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill through
Congress, the Black Swan Troubadours made a
deep swing into the charred heart of America
that was still smoldering from the Red Summer
of 1 9 1 9 , when racial violence reached a horrify-
ing peak.

Chicago was a pivotal moment. Walton sud-
denly announced an extended swing “down
south. ” Four musicians promptly quit. Ethel
Waters made an impassioned dressing-room
speech about the moral imperative to carry the
music to those who needed it most. Nobody else
bailed. Waters schooled Henderson in Harlem
stride piano by making him listen to the piano
rolls of James P. Johnson.

They played Oklahoma towns like Muskogee
and Ardmore, in the wake of the Tulsa Race
Riot, when whites had savaged a prosperous
black community. Walton’s advance press re-
leases always announced that a few seats would
be reserved for whites. It was missionary work.
Waters wore a blue pan velvet gown and gold
dangling earrings . She smiled reassuringly when

she sang her hit songs. Fletcher kept the band
from playing too hot, and backed the comedy
skits on piano. He was six-foot-two, with hair
cropped close to his head. He had never had any
burning urge to lead a band, it had just happened.

They played piney-woods towns in Arkan-
sas where survivors of the 1919 Elaine mas-
sacre might have fled. They played Paris, Texas,
which was christened by the Chicago Defender
as the birthplace of burning black people at the
stake, most recently the Arthur brothers, one
of whom had been a war veteran. But the Black
Swan group was treated amicably, and the audi-
ence included white people. In Waco, the troupe
performed within blocks of the infamous pub-
lic square where a crowd of 15,000 whites had
cheered in 1916 as a mentally deficient Negro
boy was tortured and burned alive, his torso
dragged through the streets. They played in
Austin, where an NAACP field secretary had
been beaten to within an inch of his life.

In New Orleans, Ethel Waters and Lester Wal-
ton were allowed to enter by the front door at
a hotel reception given by whites, but Fletcher
and the orchestra had to go in by the “Jim Crow”
door. They were invited to play for a local radio
station, and Fletcher became possibly the first

black bandleader to broadcast on radio. He tried
to hire a young local, Louis Armstrong, on the
spot, but Armstrong would not leave his drum-
mer. (They would meet again soon.)

Waters later claimed that in Macon, Georgia,
local whites threw the body of a lynched boy into
the theater lobby shortly before her performance
was to start, but this is inaccurate. A body was
thrown into the lobby of the Douglass Theater
some months after Black Swan passed through.
They moved on through Dixie, and scalloped
up the Eastern seaboard home to Harlem, and
the Black Swan players disbanded by the end
of the summer of 1922.

Pace Phonograph was being muscled out of the
competition by bigger white-controlled record-
ing companies, and by the mass production of
radios. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill died at the
hands of Southern senators. Pace folded in 1923,
hut young Fletcher Henderson had acquired a
lifelong love of touring. He had learned how to
lure the black public forward with a hint of the
same old sorrow wrapped in a bandanna, but to
leave behind the gold filigree of clarinets and
trumpets, like airfoils they could follow to a
better altitude.

Henderson was soon being name-checked in

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the Phonograph and Talking Machine Weekly
as one of the best freelance blues specialists
in New York. He had become one of Harlem’s
most-booked accompanists for the great blues
chanteuses, including Ma Rainey, Lucille He-
gamin, Trixie Smith, Clara Smith, and even Bes-
sie Smith, who had suffered rejection at Black
Swan. He had a secret composing life, using the
pseudonym George Brooks for blues songs that
he wrote as if knocking out nursery rhymes. We
have “George Brooks” to thank for ten of Bessie
Smith’s big numbers.

In January 1924, Henderson took his first
band out of Harlem and into Club Alabam, just
off Times Square. Its bootlegger owners had
remodeled it to make it resemble a Southern
plantation. Prohibition New Y>rk teemed with
these Dixie-themed speakeasies — Kentucky
Club, the Black Bottom, the Plantation Club,
the Cotton Club — a subtle racism soon to be
etched into the American consciousness in War-
ner Brothers wiseguy films. These were strictly
segregated, yet America was enchanted with
ham-fat songs about mammy in her bandanna
in Alabamy. Henderson’s men had to set up on
a bandstand that was a fake plantation house
back porch, in front of murals of trees scumbled
with Spanish moss. A fake French door with a
fanlight said it all: even Northern white people
liked to imagine themselves being entertained
by plantation darkies freshly convened from
the cotton fields, playing for Ole Massa hisself .

Few of Henderson’s young sidemen had ever
set foot in Dixie. Most were Great Migration
babies whose parents had long since fled the
South. Coleman Hawkins was from Topeka.
Don Redman was a prodigy out of Harper’s Ferry
who could play any instrument put in his hands.
Segregation kept them all out of “legit” sympho-
nies or pit orchestras. When Fletcher Henderson
and his colleagues squared off with that first
all-white audience at Club Alabam, it must have
felt somewhat like anthropology, a first encounter
with volatile primitives whose reputation for
barbarism had preceded them. He answered the
moment with equanimity and grace, and wooed
the whites forward toward their own evolution
with songs like “Teapot Dome Blues,” “After the
Storm,” and “My Papa Doesn’t Two-time No
Time.” As word got around, Henderson became
that “hot” Harlem bandleader you could hear
without actually having to step foot in Harlem.

When white owners tried to get Henderson
to fire Hawkins for refusing to dance with one
of the chorus girls, he declined. At first oppor-
tunity, he eased the band off the fake planta-
tion porch of Club Alabam, over to the original

Roseland Ballroom on Broadway. Roseland had
two bandstands, one black, one white. When the
white band left to tour, Henderson’s men quietly
became the house band by default. This would be
home base for Henderson for over a decade. His
audiences were white, thousands of them. Radio
broadcasts from the ballroom gave him a national
reputation. Apparently he worked without a
contract at Roseland, cash and carry. He bought
a house on Striver’s Row. By 1926 most dance
orchestras, black and white, were imitating the
Henderson sound; “pyramid” chords, sectional
counterpoint, advanced harmonies, flatted fifths.
Team racial uplift had gained considerable yard-
age. No ham fat, no hokum, no jeUyroll required.

Henderson loved to graft European orchestral
notation onto silly little street songs, to take a
single note of melody and fan it out into rich,
syncopated color. This required cutthroat sight-
reading skills, with a penchant for sudden im-
provisation. One of his sidemen later compared
the Henderson requirement to being able to
see around comers. The received wisdom was,
if you could cut the mustard in that band, jazz
yours, baby.

Some of Henderson’s best work happened
when he would rake the cheap veneer of lyrics
right off a trite white Tin Pan Alley song and
make it new. He could peel a hurtful racist song
down to its studs, then renovate it into a statelier
mansion in which a black soul could stand at
its full height. While white America was stiU
drunk on ragtime and bogus blackface “coon-
shouter” songs, Henderson minimized lyrics
and substituted jazz breaks. Louis Armstrong
learned the hard way that Henderson didn’t have
much respect for scat singing, and he began to
pour his whole story into his horn.

If Henderson’s men had something to say,
they had to say it with their instruments. This is
why those solos often achieved the power of hu-
man voice, clarinets bubbling up out of the bass
line to exchange witticisms with the trumpets. A
tuba would burp along amiably, then suddenly
assert its right to pontificate. “Sugarfoot Stomp”
(1925) runs like a souped-up Model T with a
creaky carburetor, syncopating about a half-hitch
too fast. Tbu can hear all the way into the future
on that side: a barely containable twenty-three-
year-old Louis Armstrong and a twenty-year-old
Goleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone, each
aheady in possession of a singular instrumental
voice, with Billie Holiday’s dad, Clarence, keep-
ing it all glued together with guitar. The effect
is rollicking and wonderfully crunk.

Henderson’s bands could play sweet jazz, but
their true love was hot, hard-driving stomps.

“Dionysiac heat” is the way one New York critic
described the Henderson sound in the Saturday
Review. Those old brittle 78s, he said, don’t really
capture the “golden seething spirit of a Fletcher
Henderson occasion.”

They could also signify well under the white
radar. Armstrong brought “Go ’Long, Mule” to
Henderson and Don Redman. In their hands, the
song is no longer the muddled country marma-
lade of King Joe Oliver. The woodwinds trill
in such high harmony they sound like gnats
buzzing around a mule’s head. Those gnats sound
suspiciously like the Boswell Sisters, white gals
notorious for appropriating black music and par-
laying it into fame and fortune.

Listen attentively to Henderson’s 1932 ver-
sion of the cruelly racist “Underneath a Harlem
Moon” and you can hear Hawkins, college-
educated out of Topeka, wordlessly substitute
nonchalant tenor sax for the white Tin Pan Al-
ley fake nostalgia for “’Ginia hams” and “candy
yams, ” before trailing off into a derisive, flatulent
raspberry. The worst of the original’s offensive
lyrics are erased, and W C. Handy’s daughter
Katherine sings what’s left with bite.

Some of Henderson’s recordings are important
milestones in American music: “The Gouge
of Armor Avenue,” “Wrappin’ It Up,” “Snag
It,” “Radio Rhythm,” and a host of others. In
1927, the great silent filmmaker Mumau {Nos-
feratu) used Henderson’s composition “Tozo!”
to symbolize the dangerous allure of the urban
future, in a film called Sunrise. Today we most
likely encounter Henderson’s music deployed
to evoke the past in films like The Razor's Edge,
The English Patient, Road to Perdition, the HBO
television series Boardwalk Empire.

For most of the Roaring Twenties and into
the Great Depression, Henderson’s bands were
the first turnstile through which many a young
black male musician passed, fresh from far-flung
American precincts, on the way to his rightful
place in jazz iconography: Louis Armstrong, Don
Redman, Big Charlie Green, Lester Y)ung, Rex
Stewart, Red Allen, Chu Berry, Buster Bailey,
Roy Eldridge, Cootie Williams, and a whole
pantheon of others. The most obvious case of
influence is Benny Goodman, who built his repu-
tation on Henderson’s book and his back, only
to be anointed “king of swing” in the perpetual
paternity suit that is jazz criticism.

* ♦ ★

I n a glossy promotional photo from 1932, an
elegant, lanky Fletcher Henderson stands
in the center of a line of black musicians in

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137 -

matching suits and wing tips on a pier in Atlantic
City. His arms are folded comfortably across the
front of his double-breasted suit, the wind whip-
ping his pants against his long legs. He looks like
the Sepia Jay Gatsby, only happy. This iteration
of his band was formidable, possibly his greatest
ever. The photo scans like a pocket edition of
Who’s Who in Jazz: Russell Procope, Coleman
Hawkins, Edgar Sampson, Clarence Holiday,
Walter Johnson, John Kirby, Russell Smith,
Bobby Stark, Rex Stewart, J. C. Higginbotham,
and Sandy Williams.

This is the crew that took a stock flood song
of the sort meant to be sung operatically by Paul
Robeson, “Take Me Away from the River, ” and
turned it into a wicked “viper jazz” ode to mari-
juana. Procopes clarinet percolates like a klezmer
hookah, and Hawkins blows a world-weary sax.
The menace in that song was not the Mississippi,
but a dazzling river of urban motion and light.
A couple hours after they recorded it, they gave
perfect, gentlemanly accompaniment to white
child star Baby Rose Marie as she belted out a
little charmer, “Take a Picture of the Moon,”
complete with Sophie Tucker-like barrelhouse
growls. %u would never know, looking at the
photograph of the Henderson group on that pier.

that 1932 was the beginning of the end.

Trumpet player Rex Stewart s memoir. Boy
Meets Horn, describes the breakup of this phe-
nomenal band in 1933 and Hendersons unwill-
ingness to confront whites even as they abused
and cheated the blacks. The men were usually
overbooked and underpaid, sometimes not paid
at aU. Some nights, the rumor of no pay owing to
contractual “infractions” would sweep through
the band even as they were performing, so the
musicians would fade out into the night one by
one, leaving Henderson playing alone. Stewart
describes vividly the predatory contracts, the
“chicanery and maneuvering,” and the malevo-
lent presence of New Tbrk’s notorious “Local
802” union reps backstage, demanding personal
kickbacks, threatening to ruin bandleaders who
did not comply. “Local 802” was so thoroughly
corrupt that testimony from its victims figured
prominently in 1934 Congressional hearings
on mob infiltration of the American labor force.

The straw that seems to have broken the back
of Fletcher Henderson s last good band was John
Hammond himself, who thought nothing of
signing contracts committing them to work
they’d not been consulted about, then professed
puzzlement at their perceived lack of enthusi-

asm. It’s unfortunate that jazz writers seem to
default to Hammond’s mythologizing. Hammond
said that Henderson was hindered by his lack
of business sense, his mistrust of white men,
and his “self-defeating acts of independence.”
Rex Stewart said the men quit when, the day
after they returned from a harrowing road tour
down south, Hammond had booked them to
play without pay at a benefit for the legal defense
fund of the Scottsboro Boys.

Louis Armstrong’s biographer James Lincoln
Collier called Fletcher Henderson a “tragic fig-
ure. ” Collier reminds us to take into account that
peculiar American time when black musicians
like Armstrong and Henderson fled the South
only to land in a new world “peopled on the one
hand by gangsters, who would maim and kill
if sufficiently frustrated, and on the other by
whites speaking another language and dwelling
in offices, hotels, and restaurants, where blacks
could not penetrate.”

If Henderson’s career fadeout was tragedy,
what did success look like? Louis Armstrong’s
white agent was on cordial terms with the Chi-
cago mob. He routinely skimmed half of Arm-
strong’s earnings, before deducting his agent’s
percentage, up until the day Armstrong died.

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Duke Ellington worked for years to steer jazz out
of Cotton Club plantation burlesque and into Eu-
ropean concert halls. To accomplish that he let a
white man claim half the copyright to every work
he composed, and ceded forty-seven percent of the
sweat of his brow for well over a decade. Ellington
asked to see the books one day, and promptly termi-
nated the relationship. That agent, Irving Mills, was
the man Fletcher Henderson had declined to work
with, and the inspiration for “George Brooks.” We
will never quite know what price Henderson paid
for dodging MiUs s desire for consolidated control
of his talent.

And what are we to make of Fletcher Henderson s
leading the “Connie s Iim Orchestra” in 1930 and
1931, under contract to the same white men who
drove Louis Armstrong out of America for two
years, when they tried to threaten and muscle him
into an “exclusive” engagement? In 1933, the Chica-
go Defenderused the language of slavery to describe
Hendersons Connie s Inn-related woes with a mis-
leading front-page headline story, Fletcher Hender-
son WINS $1 ,000,000 SUIT. Henderson was “freed from
the bonds,” they said, of a “theatrical agent bearing
the name and instincts of Fishman. ” Fishman once
tried to bring JeUy RoU Morton into compliance by
sending him on a “blind date” into an abandoned
mining town; now he wanted a percentage, not to
exceed a million dollars, of Fletcher Hendersons
future earnings as they would be disbursed to him
by the same Connie s Inn thugs named on Louis
Armstrong s restraining order.

By 1933, Henderson’s bankruptcy was official,
his primary creditors being one of his own sidemen,
Fishman’s Orchestral Corporation of America, and
Lou Irwin, a white man whose main meal ticket was
Ethel Merman. Irwin was the kind of gent who
would assault musicians of color who demanded
their pay, and advance clients like Billie Holiday
money for drugs and then kneecap them with
million-dollar lawsuits.

It’s not a stretch to see why $37.50 per arrange-
ment for Benny Goodman, a relative nobody with a
new radio show, would look pretty good to Fletcher
Henderson by the mid-1930s. The Chicago Defender
chastised him when he started selling off his entire
book of “head arrangements” to Goodman, saying
that if he just handed over black jazz to whites, it
would put black musicians out of work.

Egged on by John Hammond’s activism and pro-
pensity for fantasy-league jazz combinations, Good-
man and Henderson pushed the racial envelope at
their own risk, but they quietly and methodically
integrated big bands in the late 1930s. The new
white-dominant “swing” was smooth as a syndicate.
Its fans were young stompers at the Savoy blessed
with amnesia about Jim Grow. Big bands fronted

Elegy for an
Accordian

BY

CHELSEA RATHBURN

That ribbed black box that could be coaxed to croon
by surer hands than ours — where did it come from?
From whose family history? Was it in tune?

I must have been the one who brought it home
from some estate sale or bric-a-brac store.

Wherever I bought it, whatever I paid

for its pearl and filigree. I’m sure I spent more

than I should have, swayed by its beauty and swayed

by my wanting to please. My husband, who could

play anything, who’d asked for one, shelved it

in the guest room, where its bellows choked with dust.

We were young. Our marriage was never good.

OxfordAmerican.org

39 -

by whites followed Goodman s lead in adopting
Fletcher Henderson’s basic template for swing. It
seemed to telegraph something new and neces-
sary to the generation that was girding its loins
to ride to the other side of Hitler’s and Hirohito’s
bomber-yards and then home.

We don’t know enough about Fletcher Hen-
derson’s extended Grand Terrace gig in Chicago
in 1938, when the Defenderidentified the white
man who ran it, Ed Fox, as his “manager.” Fox’s
claim to fame: he co-owned the Grand Terrace
with A1 Capone’s brother. Henderson picked up
the Grand Terrace gig after Earl Hines found the
courage to walk out on a contract that had under-
paid him for years. Many black jazz musicians did
indeed lose jobs, as club after club shuttered their
doors. By 1943, one of Fletcher Henderson’s last
bands was banned by a local union from playing
the Rockland Palace in Miami because he had
hired three young white musicians eager for the
chance to play with him.

B y the time Fletcher Henderson eventu-
ally played Carnegie Hall, with the white
Goodman and the black Lionel Hampton,

the white lady sang, and nobody got lynched.
Hammond, by then Goodman’s brother-in-law
with conflicts of interest sixteen ways from Sun-
day, seemed often to sacrifice Henderson’s best
interests to the larger causes of racial integration
and Benny Goodman’s success. He positioned
a younger black piano man, Teddy Wilson, in
Goodman’s personnel. The next new replacement
white lady sang, and even Southerners ate up all
the jazz sweetness with a spoon.

Russell Procope, the great clarinetist who
lingered as long as he could with Henderson
and then left him for Duke Ellington, once de-
scribed a pivotal moment in his boyhood, hearing
Fletcher Henderson’s early recordings pouring
out of almost all the open doors and windows
of Harlem in the 1920s. The Henderson sound
inspired Procope to consecrate his own life to
jazz. He later said, “1 never got the figures, but
Fletcher Henderson musta sold a helluva lot of
records. Somebody musta made a hell of a lot of
money. Tbu can believe that.”

Grainy old film footage shows Benny Good-
man dedicating a performance to Henderson
after he died of a stroke in 1 9 5 1 , faded from the
consciousness of the American public. Good-
man’s eyes go watery, remembering. He uses the

word “genius” to describe his black colleague,
and this gesture deepened respect for Goodman
in both races. But how can we not be haunted by
his brother Horace’s stories of the toll that the
Goodman collaboration took on Fletcher? “Benny
would think nothing,” Horace said, “of calling
you up at four in the morning, teUing you, T’ve
got to have this by ten.’” Horace, a musician in his
own right, described finding Fletcher asleep at his
piano in the middle of the night sometimes and
having to lead him upstairs to get undressed for
bed, even helping him finish the work at times.

“This was the source,” wrote a New York Times
jazz critic, a decade after Henderson’s death.
The occasion was Columbia’s 1961 release of
The Fletcher Henderson Story: A Study in Frus-
tration, a four-album set covering Henderson’s
work from 1923 to 1938, now considered the
necessary compendium. It’s all here: “Sugarfoot
Stomp,” “DictyBlues,” “Variety Stomp, ’’and the
sublime and magisterial “Jackass Blues.” You can
pay your money to the white men to hear this
music, or you can forage for free on the Internet.
Whether you catch the Henderson sound on the
black swing or the white, claim it as your human
birthright. It’s an updraft that will lift you to a
place beyond race. ^

Shreveport"

• I.. • ^ ^ ^ •

DANCE ‘TIL DAWN

SEE IT. BET IT. TASTE IT. i

J**-

Discover Shreveport-Bossiers love for a good party

40 -

WINTER 2015

www.taqueriadelsol.com

42 -

WINTER 2015

Illustration by illadclphsouL (2012). illadelphsoul.weebly.com

VISIONARIES

Family

Reunion

BY

RODNEY CARMICHAEL

A bout a year and a half ago, Rico Wade
invited me to his crib. As one-third of
Organized Noize, Atlanta’s eminent
trio of producers, Wade used to live in a mini-
mansion known as the White House because
of its likeness to 1600 Pennsylvania. He’d since
downgraded to a modest brick ranch located on
the working-class end of the Cascade corridor.
When I arrived, he was barbecuing chicken on
a charcoal grill on the patio out back. Marqueze
Etheridge, his friend since middle school and
cowriter of TEC’s biggest hit, “Waterfalls,”
was there. So was Joi, longtime first lady of
Dungeon Family and originator of the style
eventually dubbed neo-soul. So was Ramon
Campbell, another friend from way back who’d
also been in the short-lived r&b group U-Boyz
along with Wade, Etheridge, and Sleepy Brown.
It was all family. And Rico was telling stories.

Not in any kind of chronological order, mind
you, just stories as fast as they could come.
About giving Marqueze his first fade in middle
school so the girls in class would stop clowning
his Jheri curl. About U-Boyz blowing their
group audition for Pebbles but still impressing
her enough to score a meeting with her then-
husband, the record executive L. A. Reid. About
working at the beauty supply store Lamonte’s,
where he met two young rappers named Andre
and Antwan, whom he would help groom into
the best-selling hip-hop group of all time.

A quick talker by nature, he tends to stutter
a bit when he gets real excited. And Rico Wade
is always excited. Already in the midst of film-
ing a documentary directed by Quincy Jones’s
son, QDIIl, titled The Art of Organized Noize,
he was also drumming up interest for a coffee
table book, an Organized Noize album, and a
memoir under the same name. As the root of
the Dungeon Family tree. Organized Noize
spawned the South’s most celebrated hip-hop
collective, opening the door for OutKast and
Goodie Mob, among many others. Since the
announcement of OutKast’s twentieth anni-
versary tour several months earlier, Rico had
become obsessed with creating some tangible
product to capitalize on the wave of renewed
Dungeon Family fandom. More than a nostalgic
rewind. Big and Dre’s onstage reunion after
a twelve-year hiatus represented a return to
relevance for the extended family. Beyond the
potential to cash in on a lifetime of investment,
it presented Rico with the opportunity to set the

record straight on the legendary rise and storied
demise of the first family of Southern rap.

He’d spent the last several years healing from
the wounds of losing his Organized Noize Re-
cords label deal, as well as his mother’s home and
the White House to foreclosure. Not to men-
tion the in-depth 2010 Vibe magazine expose
on Dungeon Family that he felt sensational-
ized his admission of cocaine use. “Media is a
motherfucker,” he’d tell me later. “1 told them I
tried coke — they tried to make me into a fuckin’
straight crackhead. ”

He laughed it off now, choosing to focus on
the bigger picture. In fact, when we met again
in August, right after the blockbuster debut of
Straight Outta Compton, he’d added “biopic” to
his list of proposed pet projects. But this movie
wouldn’t be his alone. Within Rico Wade’s nar-
rative lies the story of Atlanta. How it evolved
from civil rights stalwart to hip-hop capital.
How a tribe of outcasts rose from the dungeons
of rap to the top of the charts. And how the kid
who started from the bottom ended up here. At
forty-three, he’s still got something to prove.
Most people with music industry aspirations
find a way to build a business. Rico built a fam-
ily instead. Then he discovered why family
and business rarely mix. But when your past
is OutKast and your present is a rapper named
Future, it ain’t over till the last ATLien sings.

R ico Wade’s bedroom is decorated like a ge-
nius’s — which is a nice way of saying it’s
a total mess. Clothes scattered everywhere.

OxfordAmerican.org ■ 143-

Empty Newport boxes discarded on the floor.
An Atlanta Falcons flag hangs in one corner, an
Obama CHANGE poster on the opposite wall. “1
write on everything,” Rico says, explaining the
random scraps of paper. “A-sharp, B-flat — on
some real mad scientist shit.”

This explains his current approach to produc-
tion. Though he never let me hear any of the
new stuff Organized Noize is cooking up for
their forthcoming album, Rico says he wants
it to be a blend of everything. “I want the trap
mixed in with the EDM with the Organized
sound. I just want to evolve it.”

When I tell him I’m scared to imagine what
this new Noize might sound like, he laughs. “1
think everybody is. That’s why we ain’t putting
shit out. Everybody loves us so we gotta give
you what you want, but 1 want that shit to turn
up a li’l bit. 1 want our sound to go through
transitions. I’m into a clusterfuck. ”

Before crunk, snap, and trap music turned
Atlanta out, the red clay funk of Organized
Noize deflned the city. From the groaning bass
line of OutKast’s “Ain’t No Thang” to the ner-
vous plink of those ominous piano licks on
Goodie Mob’s “ Cell Therapy, ” the music echoed
the environment. As one of the first hip-hop
production units to forego costly sample clear-
ances for live instrumentation. Organized Noize
Productions shared more in common with the
soul legends whose source material inspired
them than they did with their superproducer
hip-hop contemporaries. The Atlanta sound
they concocted from the dungeon-like base-
ment in Rico’s mother’s house turned space and
place into elemental forces. Like Muscle Shoals
Sound Studio or Stax in Memphis, ONP remains
synonymous with ATL.

The three-man production unit Rico co-
founded with Ray Murray and Patrick “Sleepy”
Brown, using a name they’d originally intended
for a girl group, became the fuel to Dungeon
Family, birthing first-generation acts OutKast,
Goodie Mob, Big Rube, Witchdoctor, Cool
Breeze, and Backbone. Together they gave the
South a voice competitive with rap’s bicoastal
bedrocks.

Before major labels began manufacturing
mock hip-hop crews as tools to market and
promote new signees, artists formed ciphers
organically. The details of how Big and Dre
met Rico, Ray, and Sleepy — in an East Point
strip-mall parking lot on the corner of Head-
land and Delowe — have been rapped, retold,
and mythologized a thousand times over. But
it all boils down to spirit. That’s the best way
to explain what brought them there that day.

It’s the same element that eventually drew each
member of the Dungeon Family together. Even
now they remain the only legacy hip-hop crew
with “family” as the basis of their name. Not
a clique. Not a squad. Not a posse. A family.

The business came next. Since Organized
Noize already had L. A. Reid’s ear. Dungeon
Family acts OutKast and Goodie Mob signed
production deals with Organized to record for
LaFace Records. But Sleepy Brown, Ray Mur-
ray, and Rico Wade were more than producers.
They were artist developers, mentors, big broth-
ers, and player-partners to everyone under the
Dungeon Family umbrella. What started as a
loose collective of hungry emcees became an
organized unit under ONP’s leadership. The
magic they made as a family grew directly out
of a brotherhood built on shared experience
and a mission to prove hip-hop’s Down South
narrative was as essential to rap as those classic
breakbeats Georgia’s own James Brown provided
as hip-hop’s sonic DNA.

Rico, the charismatic mouthpiece of ONP, is
also something of a mystery — especially when
it comes to quantifying his musical contribu-
tion. He’s often blamed for taking too much
credit, but he’s also the one whom few outside
the immediate circle know quite how to credit.
Ray is responsible for bringing the noise as
an intuitive beat programmer with a mastery
deserving of his nickname, Yoda. Sleepy, the
son of Atlanta “dazz” band Brick’s front man
Jimmy Brown, supplies the funk as a multi-
instrumentalist soul slinger with a silky voice.
But if his collaborators have more tangible skill
sets, Rico is the trio’s X factor: part visionary,
part missionary, all purpose. Less button-down
businessman than born hustler, with a sharp
intellect and a knack for offbeat production,
Wade’s instinct for what’s next has always made
him a magnet for talent.

T o illustrate the kind of singular creative
vision Rico Wade possesses, it helps to go
back in time. Summer, 1981 : a dangerous year
to be a black boy in Atlanta. Somebody was
snatching them up at night and leaving dead
bodies behind as evidence. The whole affair
seemed out of character for the city too busy to
hate. Things were supposed to be different. The
city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, was
nearing the end of his second term. His legacy
would help bankroll a generation of black mil-
lionaires through government set-asides that
gave minority contractors a foothold in the city’s
future. The only blemish on his time in office
was the seemingly unsolvable mystery of more

than two dozen missing and murdered children.

By the time a twenty-three-year-old aspiring
music producer and youth talent scout named
Wayne Williams was arrested on suspicion of
killing two adultmen on June21, 1981, the city
was so eager to declare the case closed on the
child murders that the discrepancies and doubt
surrounding his guilt didn’t matter. The serial
killings had plagued the city for nearly three
years. In that time, Georgia’s native son, a former
peanut farmer named Jimmy, had lost his presi-
dential re-election to a jelly-bean-loving Hol-
lywood veteran. Meanwhile, the fight to make
hometown icon Dr. King’s birthday a national
holiday had gone pop with the recent release
of Stevie Wonder’s hit, “Happy Birthday.” (It
would take two more years to convince the new
president to sign it into law.)

Gloser to home, on Martin Luther King Jr.
Drive, nine-year-old Rico was about to stumble
upon a dream of his own. The way he remem-
bers it now, it looked to a kid like the circus was
coming to town. People clapping and waving. A
cowboy on horseback. There was a party hap-
pening in the parking lot of his Garden Valley
Apartments and young Rico was at the center
of it. When a well-dressed black man wear-
ing a genuine smile parted the crowd, shaking
hands and kissing babies along the way, “it
was like Jesus,” Rico says. The man handed
the boy a sticker that read young for Atlanta
and something in Rico’s soul lit up. The way
he interpreted it at the time, this was a divine
sign that Atlanta was destined for the young.
“I didn’t find out till years later that the sticker
was for Mayor Andrew Young’s campaign, ’’Rico
told me. “The campaign to me was the ‘youth
for Atlanta.’ Like, the kids.” By the time he
came to realize what those stickers really meant,
Rico was busy gearing up for a campaign of his
own — one that would put the youth of Atlanta
on the map for decades to come.

M an, the scene was so thick, he narrates over
the begirming of the video to 1993’s “Play-
er’s Ball.” Low riders. ’77 Sevilles. El Dawgs.
Nuttin’ but dem ’Lacs.

A shirtless Rico Wade exits the kitchen of
his momma’s old house in Lakewood Heights
carrying a bowl of no-name-brand cereal. His
pants are at half-sag and his hair is plaited back
in cornrows. This is Rico in his prime, at twenty-
one, with swagger on full blast. Across from
him sit Antwan Patton and Andre Benjamin,
looking cool but coy, like a couple of baby-faced
gangsters in training.

All the players. All the hustlers. I’m talking

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WINTER 2015

'bout a black man’s heaven here.

How fitting that his voice is the first one
heard on OutKast’s debut single. It goes to
show how Rico took a couple of young aspir-
ing artists, with an early penchant for rapping
about girls and video games, and elevated their
game by influencing them to represent their
hometown. The first OutKast album was in-
deed a group effort, one that not only intro-
duced the sound of Atlanta (produced entirely
by ONP) but also placed the city on hip-hop’s
map. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik contains
more than sixty-five geographical references
to the A-Town, including thirteen nods to
their East Point origins, ten shout-outs to the
dirt-floor Dungeon, eight to nearby College
Park, four to Decatur, and the first recorded
usage of the city’s international airport code,
ATL, as hometown slang. From Bankhead to
Buckhead and Club Nikki’s to Magic City, an
archaeological ethnography of postmodern
Atlanta unfolds over the course of seventeen
tracks. In other words, they excavated the hell
out of the Dirty South.

With the early success of OutKast and
Goodie Mob and the Organized Noize-pro-
duced megabits that followed (TLC’s “Water-

falls,” En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go”), industry
bigwigs began courting the trio. Rico eventu-
ally signed a $20 million deal to start Organized
Noize Records under Jimmy lovine’s Inter scope
label. But he didn’t leave L. A. Reid without
leaving behind a benevolent offering. With the
Interscope deal secured, Rico saw fit to release
both OutKast and Goodie Mob from their
production contracts so they could negotiate
better deals directly with LaFace Records. “I let
them go because they would’ve had an unfair
deal and would’ve been crying like TLC,” he
says, in reference to the deal that left one of the
best-selling girl groups in history singing the
bankruptcy blues on VHl ’s Behind the Music.
By cutting the cord. Dungeon Family’s biggest
acts were free to go their separate ways. And
in a sense, they did.

N ow picture a thirty-seven-year-old Rico
Wade, desperately salvaging records, reels,
and anything else of musical value he can get
his hands on before Fulton County sheriffs lock
him out of his home for good. When the Dun-
geon Family film is made, this will be a pivotal
scene. It’s 2009. Some family and close friends
are on hand to help, but the Family brethren

who can afford to write a check and make the
sheriffs disappear are nowhere to be found.

“I’m being strong ’cause at this point it’s
just about getting my shit, ” he narrates to me.
“Fm getting this mixing board out this house.
Like, I don’t give a fuck. We’ll come back and
knock these bricks out.” The scene climaxes
with Rico’s mother throwing her arms in the
air and yelling: “You take care of everybody.
Tbu look after everybody. Where they at now,
Rico? Where they at now?”

In the founding days of DF, Rico’s mother
would occasionally question whether her only
son was being used for his industrious charm
and giving nature. This was back when the
Dungeon doubled as a basement-hang suite,
a place of refuge for unscheduled sleepovers
or a spot to smoke out and soak up the vibe.
He’d learned to quiet her concern with a witty
response. “Maybe I’m using them,” he’d say.
But this time he had no slick comeback.

“It made me cry,” he says in hindsight. “It
almost makes me cry every time I repeat it. I
said, T ain’t tell ’em, Ma. If I call ’em, they’ll be
here. 1 ain’t tell ’em. I’m handling this myself.’”

He blames his financial straits on his liv-
ing above his means. For a decade, he paid the

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mortgages on two big houses until they both
appreciated to double their original value. But
when the IRS put liens on them, he was unable
to refinance and pay down the debt. When it
was discovered that he was putting money
into an escrow account, his attempt at filing
bankruptcy was canceled, too.

“Everybody kept asking me about the shit.
Kept getting on my fucking nerves. I was just
frustrated. Like, if God wants to take it away.
He should just take it all away. I’ll be alright.
That’s how much pressure it was,” he says.
The IRS eventually offered to reduce his debt
to a lump sum of §50,000, but even that was
more cash than he could cover. “I didn’t have
that kind of money. I could’ve gone to CeeLo,
I could’ve gone to OutKast. I just felt like it
wasn’t their fault.”

Back to the bare essentials, Rico turned “to
the East, my brother, to the East,” he says,
quoting from the classic X Clan album To the
East, Blackwards. “You know how you have
a journey, like the Chinese guy or whatever.
He’s heading back to the top of the mountain
to go back and train, study, and remember the
things he knows. That’s what I had to do. I went
to Dungeon East” — also known as the home of
his partner-in-production Ray Murray, located
on Atlanta’s east side in suburban Ellenwood.

It was as if “the great Rico Wade” had lost it
all, he explains. “But I’m cool with that ’cause
I’m a human being. And somebody’s gonna
learn from this. That’s what I really am. I’m
a martyr. I’m really somebody who selflessly
gives of himself. ”

His mother’s words had still cut him to the
core. For someone who gave so much, Rico
admits to feeling like he wasn’t always appre-
ciated. By album three, Aquemini, OutKast
had become more of a self-contained unit in
terms of production. ONP was busier, too,
with plenty of outside production work. None
of that diminished the foundational role Or-
ganized played in the duo’s development, in
addition to the trio’s continued contributions
to such hits as “Skew It on the Bar-B” and “So
Fresh, So Clean.” But with all of OutKast ’s
award-winning success, Rico still can’t recall
the group ever publicly thanking him. That
bothered him for a time until he finally said
something about it on a phone call one night
with Big Boi.

“Big might’ve broke down crying when I
first told him. I said, ‘ Y’all ain’t never thank me
before.’ But I never said it in a bitter way ever
again. I’m not bitter at them. I’m in their studio
[Stankonia] right now executive producing Big

Boi’s next album. But yeah, they hurt me with
that shit back then.”

Part of their distance was also due to the
stress Rico felt from the Interscope venture
struck with lovine in 1997. Things were shaky
almost from the start. Rico stepped outside of
the family to sign a proven artist, but longtime
Atlanta booty-shake rapper and regional star
Kilo Ah turned out to be more trouble than
he was worth. Meanwhile, Sleepy Brown had
grown disenchanted. After contributing his
sound to OutKast and putting his solo career
on the back burner for years in the name of
Organized Noize, he released The Vinyl Room
under the name Sleepy’s Theme in 1998. An
underground opus of smoked-out funk, the
album was issued independent of Organized
Noize Records/Interscope — which means Jim-
my lovine wasn’t getting everything he paid
for. That only increased the friction. Rico also
suffered over the disconnect with his former
boss and guiding force in the industry, L. A.
Reid. Together they’d made history. Now he
had to stand on his own, while Reid got to reap
the credit as OutKast went on to earn Album
of the Year accolades for Speakerhoxxx/Tbe Love
Below in 2004.

Letting out his frustrations on that phone
call with Big helped him get over it. “In my
mind, that’s a person trying to make excuses
for why their life ain’t the way it’s supposed to
be. Once you let all that go, then you’re good. ”
It also helped him come to terms with his
own role in the demise of the §20 million In-
terscope deal. “I wasn’t a businessman that
was born into business. I fought into business.
Once I had money, I had no more fight. Then I
became a pussy,” he says. “Andre 3000 said it
best: ‘Some people need adversity, Rico. You’re
one of them kinda people.’”

Losing the deal and the money and the hous-
es stripped him back down to basics. Today he
views it as a necessary setback. “I wanted to get
back to this person, the free thinker. That’s how
I punch better. That’s how we win.”

T he morning after OutKast ’s Coachella de-
but in April 2014, Andre 3000 got a phone
call from Rico Wade. After nearly a decade of
dead air from the duo, the onstage reunion
had been epic. But there were also hiccups that
revealed Dre’s reluctance to return. He’d admit-
tedly agreed to the tour out of obligation to
his brother-from-another. Big, after years of
refusing to perform or record together. But his
lack of enthusiasm was hard to hide. And when
he literally turned his back to the crowd during

what should have been a climactic performance
of “Hey Ya,” no one embraced him as the new
age Miles Davis.

Rico needed to remind Dre what was on
the line. Not as his former mentor, but as his
brother. When Dre told Rico that his fuck-it
attitude reflected his feelings for some of the
old catalog, Rico put their legacy in perspective.
He told Dre, “I feel you. But it ain’t just yours
to say ‘fuck it.’ And you ain’t just doing it for
Big. It’s for all of us. It’s for you, too.”

It must have been the inspiration Dre needed
(in addition to phone calls he got from the likes
of Prince). The following weekend, OutKast
came out for the second Coachella show with
a retooled setlist, and Andre traded his blue-
jean overalls for a futuristic spacesuit signaling
3000 was back.

The behind-the-scenes intervention is a role
Rico has always played well. Even when Out-
Kast was no longer contractually tied to ONP,
it was Rico who convinced a hesitant L. A. Reid
to release the experimental EDM track “B.O.B.”
as the debut single off Stankoniaper OutKast’s
request. His role takes on a spiritual dimension
when you consider how Andre lost both of
his parents in the two years leading up to the
reunion. Rico sees it as no small coincidence
that he shares the same astrological sign with
two other huge influences on Dre’s life: his
mother, Sharon Benjamin-Hodo, and his son’s
mother, Erykah Badu. Wade and Badu were
both born on February 26, just two days before
the birthday of Andre’s mother. That makes all
three of them Pisces to Andre’s Gemini energy.
“Y)u pick your spiritual advisors,” Rico says.
“After mom and dad, I gotta be high up there.”

With the reunion tour back on track, Rico
began seeing signs again. In particular, dollar
signs. A forty-festival tour estimated to earn
OutKast §60 million effectively wiped the
crust out of Rico’s third eye. His vision was
restored, and he could see in clear economic
terms how much people still loved the Dun-
geon Family legacy.

“I didn’t really doubt if people loved us,”
he says. “Love is respect and that’s great. I love
it. But that shit sometimes equates to financial
gain. And when I saw that OutKast was about
to get paid a million dollars, I was like, Tuck
love.”

We both break out laughing at that. But the
motive behind his paper chase ran much deeper.
Beneath the surface, Rico saw this as a way to
restore the legacy of the family tree. The Art
of Organized Noize, both the documentary
and album, became his main priority. In addi-

46 -

WINTER 2015

tion to several side projects, he began working
on the concert to end all concerts. He had big
plans: Book a show at Philips Arena. Reunite
the entire Dungeon Family, including Goodie
Mob, onstage. Have all the major Atlanta acts
that carried the torch in DF’s wake perform,
including Pastor Troy, T.I., Ludacris, Young
Jeezy. Bill the show as Georgia Power, a wink
to the utilities company. A deal to air it on CBS
was in the works. Local hip-hop and r&b station
V-103 was interested. Sponsors were lining up.
But in the end, Rico opted to put OutKast’s
needs above his own desires.

“I hate to use my relationship with them to
make them do certain stuff. Andre really didn’t
want to do a lot of those shows and I was the one
that was the most distant from him. After his
mom and his dad died, all I really needed to talk
to him about was supporting him. 1 couldn’t be
the businessman, so 1 elected to be the friend. I
elected to be genuine,” he says. “Fuck me mak-
ing some money and me trying to retire off of
you doing a show in Atlanta. ”

On the eve of OutKast’s return home for the
eventual three-day festival of shows thrown
by an outside promoter and billed as OutKast
ATLast in September 2014, 1 shot Rico a text to
see if 1 might catch up with him there. 1 figured
he’d be backstage cooling on some VIP shit.
He told me the best place to find him would
be outside the festival gates, selling Organized
Noize t-shirts.

The contrast of the most successful group in
hip-hop raking in millions on a worldwide re-
union tour while Rico Wade, who’d given them
their start and a hefty chunk of their formative
game, hustled merch seemed like a story in it-
self. It reminded me of something Rico had told
me months earlier about the family business.

“The only thing that disappoints me is that
we don’t think how we thought back then, as
far as letting each other help one another. Not
’cause you owe nobody. But because the family
was everything to me.”

T he story eventually ends where it began,
with Rico back in classic form, surrounded
by family — this time, his brothers, Ray and
Sleepy, onstage at Atlanta music venue Ter-
minal West for a live interview with NPR’s
Microphone Check podcast, which aired in June
2015. It’s rare that all three members of Orga-
nized Noize appear together for public events
since Sleepy moved to Las Vegas several years
ago. For a time, he and Rico had even stopped
talking. Sleepy admits. But they’ve done a lot
of growing since then and, with all the laughing

between them that night, it shows.

The house was packed with diehard Dungeon
Family fans, as well as several members of DF.
Rico’s younger cousin and unseen member of
OutKast, Mr. DJ, was present. So was Big Rube,
the poetic voice of conscience heard on nearly
every ’Kast album since the beginning. And so
was Big Boi, who grabbed the mic near the end
of the interview to reminisce on the DF brother-
hood and Rico’s effectiveness at pushing them
to be their best in those early Dungeon years,
oftentimes without saying a word.

“You might be down there rapping your heart
out and be like, ‘Ric’ whatchu think?”’ Big
Boi recalled. “And he’d he like, ‘Hey Ray, go
order pizza!”’

Nowadays the rappers Rico inspires are half
his age and he’s a legend in their eyes. Rico
Wade still epitomizes Atlanta. When we meet
up for lunch a couple months later in August,
he pulls out his phone to show me something
that has him beaming. It’s a video snippet for a
song from the forthcoming mixtape Free Agent
3, produced by one of his cousin Future’s main
collaborators, 808 Mafia boss Southside. The
hook for the song is a bit of braggadocio in
which Rico Wade becomes a universal metaphor
for being at the top of one’s game:

Walkin ' ’round like a lick cause we gun-
ning shit,

Feelin ’ like Rico Wade on my Dungeon shit.

“That means we still cool to the young kids. We
still cool to them, ” Rico says through an easy
smile. “It helps us stay relevant.”

His own industry bragging rights now come
in the form of Future. The success of 201 5 ’s
DS2, Future’s third label album, crowned him
the current king of trap. The fickle subgenre
is notorious for producing stars with reigns
shorter than third-world despots, but at least for
now Future’s family ties have become bankable
cachet. It’s Rico, after all, whom Future credits
for encouraging him to simplify his style and
rap what he’s hved. “Future is my li’l cousin and
he runs this trap shit. That gives me one more
motherfuckin’ thing over Pharrell, Timbaland,
Dr. Dre, and anybody else.”

He’s sounding cocky again, like the old Rico
Wade. Which is a good thing. And with zero
regrets about the past, he’s got twenty more
years to stack his paper back and another twenty
to sit on it, by his estimation.

As for the future of Atlanta, things have
changed — but he’s cool with it. “I feel like
what’s missing from the game now is some

passion. But it’s funny though — they are get-
ting it. Because what I am u Atlanta. So they
get it in a Young Thug, they get it in a Future.
It’s just not as organized.”

Speaking of which, he, Ray, and Sleepy have
been steadily working on the new album. The
Art of Organized Noize will be comprised most-
ly of instrumentals and old unreleased Dun-
geon Family tracks. But he says there should
also be room for some new collaborations with
Big and Dre, and he’s recently been in touch
with CeeLo. Rico and L. A. Reid, whom he
still refers to as a father figure, are also back
on solid terms.

Meanwhile, Rico Wade’s been keeping late
hours, while the Obama change poster watch-
es overhead, as he experiments with ways to
bridge the current digital wave with ONP’s
old analog production techniques. Just last
night he was on the Internet downloading free
plug-ins to gain access to thousands of virtual
sounds and effects for his midi keyboard, he
explains as I cram to understand, trying to
make sense of it all.

“See, you old, you old!” he says, laughing
at me while reveling in his own indomitable
spirit. “I’m still young, though.” "if

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o

Homecoming

Queen

BY

MAXWELL GEORGE

N orth Augusta Baptist Church is a humble
house of God, steepleless and cast in
brick, with a pair of squat towers flank-
ing the stained-glass black Messiah on its fa(jade.
Last summer, I got my picture taken next to the
marquee out front, which advertised an upcom-
ing Youth Revival weekend — fitting enough,
since my being there related to a former young
congregant. In the mid-1960s, soul singer Sha-
ron Jones gave her first public performance here,
as a singing angel in the Christmas pageant
when she was in the third grade.

Several days after my visit, in the vacant
lobby of a Marriott Suites in Alpharetta, a sub-
urb north of Atlanta, Jones remembered her
childhood in Augusta — or more accurately in
“Georgia-Lina,” as James Brown, the city’s most
famous native, dubbed it. Augusta, Georgia,
and North Augusta, South Carolina, across
the Savannah River, are effectively one place,
locally referred to as simply Augusta.

“Oh, it was a different world,” she said. “It
was a different world.”

Jones grew up not in Georgia-Lina, but in
New Ytrk. In 1959, catching the tail end of the
Great Migration, her mother, Ella Mae Price,
moved north with her three little girls, escap-
ing an abusive relationship with their father.
Sharon, the youngest, was three. From then on,
her childhood was divided between Brooklyn
and Augusta, where she and her sisters spent
summers with their father and brothers, as well
as all of Sharon’s third-grade year, when her
parents tried getting back together.

Down south, Sharon discovered music — at
church, on the radio, and in the audience with
her father at a James Brown concert one summer.
“He jumped on the stage,” Jones recalled, and
the J.B.’s dropped into something and James
Brown started moving his feet. “I was eye-level
with the stage. And I was like, ‘Dad! Look, Dad,
he’s floating.’” Her course was set.

Though Jones has a fondness for her early
days in Augusta, she also recalled the shock
of encountering segregation and intolerance
for the first time. In New York, she attended
an integrated school and one of her favorite
teachers, Mrs. Chandler, was white. In South
Carolina and Georgia, white adults were scary
andmean. “They putthefearin you,” she said.
Even the birds were racist. “There was a store
on the corner, a little candy store right off of
West Avenue, and as soon as black kids went in
there, they had a bird trained to use the n-word:
niggers stealin'. Y)u walk in the store: niggers
stealin niggers stealin

Despite memories like these (she has plenty),
Jones is not bitter about this chapter of her past.
But she is not naive. “Those summers I went
back,” she told me, “they was hell.” This re-
minded me of what James Brown sang in 1974:
“It’s hell down here!” Intentional or not, the
reference was apropos.

Since 2002, Sharon Jones and her band, the
Dap-Kings, have been the world’s standard-
bearing funk-bringers. And while their albums
are a place where serious deep-soul music per-
sists, Jones — like Brown — has been anointed
because of the spectacle of her live show. On
Sharon’s stage, delivery and dance moves are
queen, and in her audience one can rediscover
the lost arts of performance: command, direc-
tion, showmanship, sincerity. She could win a
room on the hearty and heartfelt substance of
her voice alone, but Sharon Jones doesn’t ever
simply sing; she sings and shuffles, she sings
and dips, she sings and screams and goads and
charms and, yes, she floats.

Though Jones lived in New York for more
than fifty years, made her career there, and is
closely associated with the city — her stint as a
correction officer on Rikers Island is routinely
invoked — she is a Southerner again. She now
lives in a quiet neighborhood on the same street
as her old church in North Augusta. It’s been
nearly five years since she came home.

D on Rhodes has a faint white mustache and
a tendency to salivate when talking that
lends him a grandfatherly aspect, although he
is spry for a man in his late sixties, and remark-
ably sharp. He is known around Augusta as
Ramblin’ Rhodes, and if you get a chance to
meet him there in his hometown — where he
has lived his entire life, save a few wilderness
years spent dowmiver in Savannah in his twen-
ties — you won’t need to ask how he came into
this nickname, which also serves as the title
of his biweekly country music column in the

Augusta Chronicle. Ramblin’ Rhodes, the man,
possesses two primary qualities: an extensive
and ranging knowledge, both informational
and anecdotal, and a charitable, if mildly ag-
gressive, loquacity. He cannot help but share
what he’s learned from having “written about
all this a whole lot,” as he told me. “All this”
refers specifically to the milieu and minutiae of
Augusta — its geography and politics, its culture
and history, and especially its many famous
sons and daughters. Besides his column, which
he’s been filing since 1971 (country music his-
torian Robert Oermann designated “Ramblin’
Rhodes” the longest-running country music
column in America), Rhodes has written numer-
ous books, including Say It Loud!: The Life of
James Brown, Soul Brother No. 1; TyCohh: Safe
at Home; and Legendary Locals of Augusta. “Let
me know if I’m boring you,” he said more than
once during our morning together. “I don’t
know when I’m talking too much.”

It was a Sunday in early July, and Rhodes
had agreed to give me a tour of the city in his
Buick. As I tried to get my bearings, he steadily
narrated the city’s history, constantly interrupt-
ing himself to point out landmarks : President
Woodrow Wilson’s prim boyhood home; the
Augusta Exchange Glub Fairgrounds, shabby
from disuse, where Ty Cobb played his first
professional ball; an unassuming office com-
plex that once housed the Soundcraft recording
studio where James Brown cut “Get on the
Good Foot” and Larry Jon Wilson later recorded
“Sheldon Churchyard”; the nightclub turned
funeral home, a curious low-slung concrete
building beside the highway, where Michael
Jackson was allowed a private early-morning
viewing of James Brown’s body before his final
memorial at James Brown Arena after his death
in 2006. We crossed the river many times, and
I understood the Georgia-Lina designation.

The night before, I was given an introduction
to Augusta by one of Rhodes’s colleagues at
the Cbron, a middle-aged music writer named
Stephen Uhles. Uhles has been following Sha-
ron Jones since her first hometown show, in
early 2006, at the Soul Bar, a tiny venue on
Broad Street. That performance, he wrote at
the time, was for Jones “a literal and spiritual
homecoming,” and it was the spark, perhaps,
for her eventual permanent return.

After dinner at a new barbecue restaurant,
Uhles took me downtown to meet Coco Rubio,
the man whose gamble in 1993 to open the Soul
Bar on the desolate main stretch jump-started
the revitalization of Augusta’s center city. It was
hard for me to imagine a vacant Broad Street,

48 -

WINTER 2015

which is one of the widest boulevards in the
country and lined with stately old buildings.
That night it was lively with pedestrians of all
stripes. As Uhles parked us behind the strip,
he recalled the days when you wouldn’t want
to leave your car on Broad. Now you simply
can’t get a spot.

We found Rubio in the sound booth at Sky
City, his newer, bigger venue down the street,
where he was working a bill of local bands.
While casually manning his post, leaning for-

ward occasionally to idly thumb the knobs and
levers on his wide soundboard, Rubio talked
about the old days, when most of the buildings
downtown were abandoned and he threw secret
shows on their upper floors. Between sets we
visited the greenroom, where the next band
ate vodka-infused watermelon from a Tupper-
ware container, and everyone canvassed for the
hometown vibe. A couple of the musicians had
recently relocated to Charleston, but they were
thinking of coming back. At one point, Rubio

took out his phone and showed me a candid por-
trait he’d taken of James Brown hunched over a
pool table at the Soul Bar, beaming from across
a supersaturated expanse of turquoise felt.

E verybody I met in Augusta had a James
Brown story: the Godfather of Soul roam-
ing around town in his baby-blue Rolls-Royce,
showing up unbidden at parties and concerts,
hanging around like he was anyone while mak-
ing sure everyone remembered exactly who he

Sharon Jones, Augusta (2015). Photo by Tim Duffy

OxfordAmerican.org

49 -

was. Many people also had a Sharon Jones story.

Since Jones moved to Augusta in 2011, she
and Ramblin’ Rhodes have become fishing bud-
dies and close confidants. On Sunday morning
before our driving tour, he took me to one of her
favorite spots, the Huddle House on Ellis Street,
where our waitress, Sandra, laughed when he
mentioned I was interested in Jones. “Sharon?”
she said. “She ain’t better than me, but she’s
good.” From our booth you could nearly see
the site of the old University Hospital where
Sharon Lafaye Jones was born on May 4, 1956,
in a stockroom, because they didn’t have a bed
for her mother in the Lamar Wing for blacks,
or more likely the family couldn’t afford one.

During our day together, Don told me nu-
merous stories about his friend Sharon. Three
years ago, he invited her to the Rhodes family’s
annual Christmas reunion at his Aunt Holland’s
place two hours south in middle Georgia, “off
in nowhere.” To his surprise, she accepted,
and she even sang “Happy Birthday” — a tradi-
tion, since many of Don’s family members have
holiday birthdays — in the manner of Stevie
Wonder. The next year, they were out on the
lake fishing together when Don got the call
that his sister had succumbed to cancer. In the

car, he marveled at whatever fate had brought
them together, a gay white Southern man and
a black woman from Brooklyn. “Five years ago,
she didn’t know who 1 was, ” he said, “and now
we’re best friends.” Then he apologized, wiping
his eyes, and I realized he was crying.

That morning, not far from the stretch of
highway where in 1988 James Brown had led
cops on a brief, twenty-miles-per-hour chase
on shot-out tires — not exactly high speed, as
was widely misreported — Don turned into a
residential neighborhood in North Augusta
and parked out front of a small yellow-brick
bungalow on a corner. He’d taken me to Sha-
ron Jones’s home. I wasn’t anticipating a house
call, but Don hopped out and knocked on the
carport door and Dora Jones opened it. A tiny
and energetic woman, much like her famous
younger sister, Dora welcomed us inside as if
she’d been expecting our visit. The living room
was tidy, but felt unfinished. Their brother Ike
sat in a recliner watching an old Western. On
one wall hung a gone fishing sign. As usual,
Sharon was away on tour.

Dora and Don, who was clearly a regular
guest, pointed out a few souvenirs from Sharon’s
career, including the framed thank-you letter

from Michelle Obama, whom Sharon met in
2012 when she and the Dap-Kings performed
in a Marvin Gaye tribute concert at the Kennedy
Center. On the floor in one corner, a collection
of photographs and memorabilia waiting to be
hung resembled a kind of makeshift shrine to
Sharon. Dora told some stories from their early
childhood in that very neighborhood, how they
would fish in the pond and cool peaches in the
stream. She remembered Sharon singing “Jesus
Loves Me” and telling everyone that she was
going to be a famous singer one day.

T he kind of music Sharon Jones and the Dap-
Kings make is, in one word, soul, though
to really get at it you need a train-car handful:
sweet-and-sour soul-searching dap-dippin’
back-pocket funk. James Brown is the chief
inspiration for Jones’s professional partner,
the songwriter, producer, and Dap-Kings bass
player known as Bosco Mann (his given name is
Gabriel Roth). Fifteen years ago, Roth founded
the Brooklyn-based independent label Daptone
Records with saxophonist Neal Sugarman to
create an outlet for vintage funk and soul, old
school rhythm & blues — with an emphasis on
the former in both of those classic binaries. Roth

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and Jones met in the nineties through her ex-
fiance, a musician, and they quickly recognized
a kindred aesthetic. Though she often says she
had been told by industry suits that she was
“too fat, too black, too short, and too old” to
be a successful singer, Jones had maintained
her chops in wedding bands and church choirs.
To Roth, it was only her voice that mattered.
From day one, she has been Daptone’s doyenne.

Whatever you call her music, don’t say
“revival,” a term the Dap-Kings get leveled
with too often, and one she hates. Many peo-
ple discovered Sharon Jones in 2006, after the
Dap-Kings were tapped to play behind Amy
Winehouse on her second album. Back to Black,
which would win a host of awards and continues
to sell millions. Jones resented that a little, un-
derstandably, since her own critically acclaimed
music had always fallen short of a broad recep-
tion. In 2015, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
finally received their first Grammy nomination,
in the Best R&B Album category, for their fifth
LP, Give the People What They Want. They lost
to Toni Braxton & Babyface, who have won
eighteen Grammys between them.

The simple cover of 2002 ’s Dap Dippin ’ with
. . . Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, their debut
album (and 001 in the Daptone catalog), is made
up mostly of black space. The title runs across
the top in a primary color treatment. Below it,
way off toward the right-hand margin, stands
Jones in a glittery red dress, and next to her, run-
ning off the sleeve, is half a saxophone player,
the identifying details of his face cut off by
the cover’s edge, an effect that encourages the
listener to imagine the rest of the Dap-Kings,
whoever they are, in line behind her out of
frame. Jones, mic in hand, hip turned out, left
arm confidently cocked, is singing back toward
the center, into darkness.

I imagine her belting the album’s first song,
“Got a Thing on My Mind,” a defiant blaster
that can serve as a thesis statement for her career.
“I got a thing on my mind / I’m sure I’m gonna
find it,” Jones sings, packing the lines with all
the pent-up ambition of a forty-six-year-old
woman who’d never been given the shot she
knew she deserved. “Don’t let nobody tell me
my bangin’ won’t come true / ’Cause I ain’t lyin’
down ’til I get my dues.”

She hasn’t gotten them yet, and so she con-
tinues.

T he night of our meeting at the Marriott,
Jones was to perform in Alpharetta on the
Wheels of Soul tour with the Tedeschi Trucks
Band. I was nervous about confessing that I’d

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visited her house without her invitation — that
I stood in her living room and talked about her
with Dora, who told me that I was now part
of the family. But Jones reassured me. “You
didn’t weird me out, that’s okay. That’s Don.”

She was in street clothes: loose pants and a
plain black vest, with silver star-shaped ear-
rings for just a hint of style, which she shows
in spades when she wants to. The outfit could
be called “fisherman casual,” and this more or
less encapsulates her normal, offstage persona.
Sharon’s father taught her to fish when she
was a girl and it is an obsession. (Although she
didn’t know until years after he died, it was
also from her dad that Sharon inherited the
musical gene — he’d been a singer in barbershop
quartets.) That night at the concert, one of her
buddies from Augusta told me about the time
she called their mutual friend at 3 a.m. from
Germany, during a European tour, to talk about
how the fish were biting back home.

Generous in conversation, Jones talks fast,
indulging tangents and incidental whims. I
imagined her and Ramblin’ Rhodes in a small
boat in the middle of a lake somewhere, trad-
ing gossip and reeling in bass. We had been
talking for almost an hour when she whipped
out her phone and began scrolling through
her photo history. She was looking for photos
from a concert she’d attended in her hometown
in January. It was a show put on by the James
Brown Academy of Muzik Pupils (JAMP), a
program founded by Brown’s daughter Deanna
Brown Thomas that employs former J.B. ’s side-
men to teach Augusta kids how to get down. As
Jones searched back through her library for the
JAMP pics — “Them little bahies is crazy! ” — I
was granted a viewing of her year in reverse.

“That’s me and Queen Latifah actin’ stupid.”
Jones tilted the screen and showed me a hand-
ful of blurry mirror selfies of her and Latifah
alternately mean mugging and cracking up.

“That’s me with Green. ” Sharon and CeeLo
had each performed in a David Byrne tribute
show at Carnegie Hall in March.

“That’s me and Binky at the Grammys. ” She
and the Dap-Kings’ guitarist and emcee, Binky
Griptite, were dressed to the nines.

“How was that?” I asked, forgetting about
the outcome.

“ Sucked . I left an hour and a half before they
ended.” She swiped on.

“Oh, there go the babies.” She’d found
the JAMP show. “Ain’t they the cutest little
things?” She played a video she’d taken at the
concert in February at Augusta’s Bell Audito-
rium. “They are tight! Adults can’t play like

the way they play. People think they can play
funk and soul — no, baby, this is how it’s done!

“This is Christmas Day — look what I’m
dressed in.” Last year, Jones, who has per-
formed on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving
Day Parade, rode in a trolley with Don Rhodes
in the North Augusta Christmas Parade, sing-
ing “White Christmas” in a white coat and
Santa hat.

I asked Jones why she’d decided to move
back to Augusta, after so many years away; her
visits back grew infrequent after her dad died
when she was twelve. After her grandparents
passed away, she stopped returning at all, until
her band booked the 2006 show at the Soul
Bar. Sharon explained that she returned for
her mother. In 2011, Ella Mae was dying of
cancer, and Sharon — who, despite her great
career success, was living with her mom in
the projects in Queens — had finally saved
enough money to get them out. She wanted
her mother to spend her last days back home,
so Sharon bought the yellow house in their
old neighborhood in North Augusta. Dora,
who’d been living alone in the Bronx, came,
too. “She lived nine months after we got in the
house,” Jones told me, of her ailing mother.
“That was the hurting part.” When her mother
died, in March 2012, the Dap-Kings were on
the road. A year later, Sharon was diagnosed
with bile duct cancer.

The illness and accompanying chemotherapy
kept her from touring for almost a year and de-
layed the release of Give the People What They
Want. She got right back to it as soon as she
was able. During this time, the Qscar-winning
documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple fol-
lowed Jones and the Dap-Kings while Sharon
fought and overcame the cancer and returned to
performing. Then in early 201 5 , a month before
she would attend the Grammys as a first-time
nominee, Jones had to have a procedure to
remove a new tumor. “So there has not been a
break for me since 2010,” Sharon said.

I asked if a break was on the horizon. Jones
told me her plan is to “keep going. Just keep
going. Just keep doing it, you know?”

A couple weeks before we met in July, an
MRI revealed that the cancer had reappeared;
Jones had a tumor on her liver. She hadn’t an-
nounced it publicly yet, she told me, but it was
back again and she was tired. Not exhausted,
it seemed, but annoyed. “I don’t want it to
keep reoccurring,” she said. “I don’t want it
every six months — messing with the cancer.
It’s the worst.”

Jones finished out the summer tour with

the Tedeschi Trucks Band, dancing and
screaming — I can attest as a witness — with
no perceivable lack of her famous energy. But
in August, instead of going into the studio
to record a planned seventh album, she went
back into surgery.

A month later, Kopple ’s documentary Miss
Sharon Jones! premiered at the Toronto Inter-
national Film Festival. After the screening,
Sharon came onstage, alongside her oncologist
and her band, and revealed the latest cancer
news. The audience was shocked, since the
documentary ends triumphantly with her
healthy and touring. Jones vowed that she
would keep singing, no matter what. Nothing
would keep her from, she said, “giving the
people what they want. ” Three days later, she
began another round of chemo.

S hould Sharon Jones get her way, we the
people will continue to get what we want
for a long time to come. Her dream, she told
me, whenever she gives up touring regularly,
is to become a producer. She wants to discover
talented kids at home, through the JAMP
school, and bring them up to Daptone to make
records. She’ll settle in at the house with her
siblings, get a fishing boat, and finally remove
the tags from the new grill she received as a
house-warming gift five years ago. Don will
come over with his partner, Eddie. Maybe
Uhles and Coco will be there. They’ll talk
about James Brown.

In the months since we met. I’ve been keep-
ing up with Sharon’s recovery, listening to the
Dap-Kings’ latest. It’s a Holiday Soul Party, and
checking in with Don back in Augusta. Around
the time when Sharon made her most recent
prognosis public in September, he had an ac-
cident. Sharon called him in the hospital from
upstate New Ytrk, where she was undergoing
treatment. “The type of person she is,” Don
said: “more concerned about me falling off the
roof than her cancer coming back. ”

Reading about Sharon’s perseverance and
steadfast character in spite of her latest set-
back, I’m drawn to something she told me at
the hotel that day — this cool, cryptic, tossed-
off line that could be the refrain to a great funk
song. “I know I’m a little older. I don’t know
how long I’m gonna be here,” she said, with
all her unrestrained honesty and confidence,
“but right now, while I’m here, you better
get it.” We were talking about her music, and
the comment seemed not directed at me but
more of a note to self. Sharon Jones, you bet-
ter get it. "I

52 -

WINTER 2015

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BY

LANCE LEDBETTER

1 don’t know if the term “Cosmic South-
erner” is something I came up with or if I
read it somewhere or heard someone say
it, but it’s an idea I’ve carried with me for a
long time. When I was a kid, growing up in
tiny LaFayette, Georgia, I often visited the
visionary painter Howard Finster, who resided
in his “Paradise Garden” in nearby Pennville.
Finster was the first Cosmic Southerner I iden-
tified — he held deep Southern roots and felt a
cosmic connection to the universe, which he
expressed through his lifestyle and art. In the
years since. I’ve recognized this curious inter-
section embodied in artists I’ve admired, and
some I’ve known. Pharoah Sanders, Andre
3000, and Benjamin from the band Smoke are
true Cosmic Southerners. Atlanta’s Col. Bruce
Hampton is another.

Every Wednesday at 12:22 P.M., a rotating
group of people meets for lunch in one of
the many Chinese restaurants along Buford
Highway in North Atlanta. They are gener-
ally all men, though not always. Some have
known each other for fifty years, some thirty-
five, some have never met. The one constant is
the host, the man who knows everyone : Col.
Bruce. He greets guests with the customary
handshake (the touching of pinky fingertips),
and sometimes an offhand comment about
how many months and days it is until their
birthday. He is a genius, in many shades of
the word.

Though if you ask him, he’ll claim he’s from
“Themis, the tenthmoon of Saturn,” Hampton
has two birth certificates from a small town in
Tennessee. His family moved to Atlanta when
he was two weeks of age. Now sixty-eight,
he’s lived here his entire life. He began playing
music as a child and quickly developed a taste
for the surreal. His best-known projects are the
avant-garde groups Hampton Grease Band and
the Aquarium Rescue Unit, and he is recognized

as one of the progenitors of spontaneous, long-
form improvisation in rock music. For this,
Hampton gets credited, alongside the Grateful
Dead, as a godfather to the modern jam band
scene — though he’s had numerous chapters in
his career. He claims to own a tape he’ll never
publish of a drunken early-morning jam session
between B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, and John
McLaughlin. In 2014, he had a cameo in a Run
the Jewels music video, dramatically choking
on a hamburger at an Atlanta diner. Sun Ra (an-
other Cosmic Southerner) is his “outspiration.”
Almost every person who congregates at
these lunches has some connection to the mu-
sic industry. As sweet and sour soup, hot tea,
kung pao shrimp, ginger green beans, cod stew,
and Diet Cokes land on the table, the topic of
conversation bounces from tour manager war

stories to festival circuit intersections to ob-
scure baseball statistics from decades past. It is
hard to imagine a person with greater firsthand
knowledge of Atlanta music than Col. Bruce
Hampton — or a more generous dispenser of
the same. The following stories were excerpted
from an interview my wife, April, and I con-
ducted after lunch at Northern China Eatery
on June 3, 2015.

COL. BRUCE HAMPTON: Did I tell you
about Jimi Hendrix? What’s so funny, they
lived on Delowe Drive — Bobby Womack,
Johnny Jenkins, and Jimi Hendrix — each black,
left-handed, upside-down Stratocaster players.

LANCE LEDBETTER: Bobby was the band-
leader at the time, right?

54 -

WINTER 2015

“Pollution,” collage by Bryan Olson

COL. BRUCE; Yeah, the Isleys. They all
played with the Tams, Gorgeous George,
the Isley Brothers, and Little Richard. Then
Little Richard fired Jimi for outdressing him.
He was just a guitar player, but I dug him
because he’d dip down and play weird solos,
and they’d get pissed at him. We would go
to Misty Waters in Decatur to watch them
play. They would be opening for Joe South
or somebody like Billy Joe Royal back in ’63.
When 1 met Hendrix in 1970, he heard I was
from Atlanta, and all he wanted to know about
was Blind Willie McTell. He was obsessed.
I told him about the barbecue place, and his
eyes were like a kid’s. Pig ’n Whistle was the
name of it. We were there every Sunday after
church. 1 saw him, without exaggeration,
forty, sixty times, but I did not know that
it was Blind Willie McTell. There were four
guys out there using two long ropes and one
of them was him.

APRIL LEDBETTER: What do you mean
by “long ropes”?

COL. BRUCE: He was blind! He would go
get the money and deliver the food to the

car, and they had a rope tied to the stand
and he would take the rope, get the money,
and bring it back in. And he lived right on
Myrtle Street, and so did I. So 1 saw Blind
Willie McTell when I was ten or eleven and
did not know it till I was twenty. It was 1969
when a guy named George Mitchell turned
me on to Blind Willie McTell.

LANCE: Who’s the most significant musician
from Georgia?

COL. BRUCE: Fletcher Henderson. He’s the
most under-recognized Georgian there is. In
1989, I asked Sun Ra the best big bands he
ever saw, and he said, in this order: Fletcher
Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie,
Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman. And
he said Henderson’s bands were ten times
better than the rest of them. So that’s heavy.

APRIL: Do you think Georgia’s music is
overlooked?

COL. BRUCE: Always. There’s only four
states that produce ninety-five percent of
America’s music: Mississippi, Tennessee,

Georgia, and Louisiana. That’s ninety-five per-
cent of the music that’s come out of America.

They talk about New Orleans, Missis-
sippi, Tennessee — and you should, because
great music. But they never go, “Hey, Geor-
gia has that I”

In a ninety-mile radius you’ve got: Johnny
Mercer, Otis Redding, Little Richard, James
Brown, a guy named Ray Charles — that’s
just the big five right there. Besides Gladys
Knight, Jerry Reed, and my man, Fletcher
Henderson. Ma Rainey. Fiddlin’ John Car-
son, who wrote everything. It goes on and
on, as you well know.

LANCE: Why is so much great music made
here?

COL. BRUCE: Because of the humidity that
surrounds us. Y)U lose your stinking mind and
have to go crazy to remain sane! Things are
so backwards here. Frontwards is backwards.
"You know? One and one is two, but what’s
one? Southern people are fucking crazy. And
if you’re not crazy, you’re driven crazy. And
if you don’t have that crazy in you, you’re
not any good.

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55 -

56 -

WINTER 2015

Killer Mike. © Bryce Duffy/Corbis

o

Dope Over
Decades

BY

AUSTIN L. RAY

W hen I called Killer Mike he was at Harts-
field-Jackson International, about to
leave for England, where his rap duo.
Run the Jewels, would be performing for a crowd
of 175,000 at the iconic Glastonbury Festival.
It was 8:15 P.M. on a Wednesday in June, and I
wanted to ask him what it’s like to be a rapper at
the top of his game at age forty. But he was run-
ning a little late, and before he could play one of
the biggest shows of his life, he had to clear the
TSA in Atlanta. He said he’d call me right back.

“If you don’t hear from me by 8:35, you call
me back,” Mike said. “That means I’ve been de-
tained, and your story just got a whole lot more
interesting.”

W ith very rare exception, rap music is a young
person’s game. Even in Atlanta, home to
many of the biggest artists in rap history, a city
that’s proven itself the rap capital of the world
time and again, a new generation has taken over —
Andre 3000 and Big Boi, CeeLo, T.I., and Young
Jeezy have ceded the scene to the next wave
of artists like Future, Migos, Y)ung Thug, and
Rich Homie Quan. Vet, at the age when most
rappers have effectively retired, burned out,
or become irrelevant altogether, Killer Mike is
releasing some of the best music of his career
to the widest audience he’s ever reached. He
broke through fifteen years ago, as a guest on a
couple of standout OutKast tracks: “Snappin’
and Trappin’ ” from 2000’s Stankonia, and a year
later on “The Whole World, ” for which he won
a Grammy. But Mike has flourished like never
before with Run the Jewels, the partnership
formed in 2013 with the critically acclaimed,
veteran Brooklyn rapper El-R In September, they
performed the song “Angel Duster” (backed by
celebrated art-rockers TV on the Radio) on The
Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It was Colbert’s
second week as host, so the show was drawing
intense media scrutiny and no doubt every guest

was carefully considered. “I kill my masters, I
mentor none,” Killer Mike rapped during the
performance. “That means when I die that’s it /
My style is gone. I’m a one of one.” Afterward,
when Colbert went in for a handshake, Mike
gave him a giant hug.

Michael Render was born on April 20, 1975 .
If you know much about him, then his day of
birth may seem like a put-on. For instance, he
celebrates 4:20 every day by lighting up and
announcing it on Twitter, sometimes twice. (His
Twitter bio reads: “I like my woman, my kids,
weed, polo, and politics.”) His fortieth 4/20
wasn’t just a milestone, it was an event — Mike’s
wife, Shana, threw him a surprise party. “Aw,
man, I cried like a baby,” he told me. She invited
friends from all over the country, and all points
of his life. “Everything from ex-girlfriends to my
mom, my friends from as far back as kindergarten
to my accountant, who I had just hired. It was
beautiful, man. She told me to get down there,
and I walked in the room and saw the bottle
service and thought I had honestly walked into
someone else’s party. I walked back out the door!
It was like, ‘No, idiot, this is yoarparty!’”

The celebration was held at a hookah lounge
next to Mike and Shana’s barbershop, about
twenty minutes southwest of downtown At-
lanta. He was surprised by the party, sure, but
not by the person who organized it. “Shana is
the number one wife,” Mike said. “I couldn’t
see myself without her.” That night, she also
gave him a surprise birthday present — a second
barbershop in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward.

T he new Graffitis SWAG Shop is located
along Edgewood Avenue in the 04 W, a long-
blighted neighborhood that has seen massive
revitalization in recent years. Up the street. Sister
Louisa’s Church of the Living Room & Ping Pong
Emporium is slammed on weekend nights; it’s
the kind of place where celebrities like Lady
Gaga and Owen Wilson show up for a drink or
a game. The restaurant Staplehouse is the talk of
Atlanta’s foodie community. There’s an arcade-
themed bar called Joystick.

Mike got into barbershops because of their
importance in the black business community.
He’d seen too many located in some rough places,
so in 201 1 he and Shana designed SWAG (Shave,
Wash, and Groom) to be more inclusive — a safe
space for anyone who might need it. The new
location is painted a stunning bright red with
ornate gold lettering on the window. Beneath the
logo is the phrase: not your ordinary barber-
shop. I met Killer Mike there a few weeks after
he got back from Glastonbury. He hopped out of

his pickup clad in all black (t-shirt, cargo shorts)
except for a pair of sharp, blue-and-orange Nikes.
I noticed, too, that he was without his sling. “I
can’t fight, but I can hug pretty good,” he told
me, when I pointed this out.

At South by Southwest in March, Mike
tore his rotator cuff fighting off a fan who had
climbed on the stage and rushed El-P. “I didn’t
really know what to think, it was all instant,”
he said. “But I knew I hurt something in my
arm and I knew we couldn’t stop the show.” It
required surgery, which he had nine days after
his birthday, and he’d been touring in a sling
since. When I saw Run the Jewels at Big Guava
Festival in Tampa less than two weeks after his
operation, he sashayed wildly around the stage
shouting, “One arm and aU, motherfuckers! One
arm and all! ” I reminded him of that show and
Mike admitted that his physician “strongly sug-
gested I shouldn’t perform. But he’s obhgated as
a doctor to say that.” The injury has taught him
“to look at life a little differently, you know? I
know my body is hurtable now. I don’t wanna
stop doing this, so I gotta stay strong.”

Mike’s self-rehance grew from his childhood
in the West Atlanta neighborhood of Adamsville.
Although his mom was one of the first people
to expose him to rap music, he was brought up
primarily by his grandparents, Bettie Clonts and
WiUie Burke Sherwood. “The people who raised
me were forty-three and fifty-three when I was
bom,” Mike told me. “We took a vacation every
year. We fished, we hunted. They talked shit,
drank liquor. I met them at this age, ” he explained,
referring to his own. “And they were active.”

“By the time I was nineteen years old, I could
shoot, I knew how to fish, I knew how to grow
food,” Mike said. “I had seen my grandparents
do everything that could be done for us by them-
selves. That breeds a confidence. I was just never
taught to be afraid.”

Fearlessness and confidence are a defining
theme for Run the Jewels. With El-P, Killer
Mike creates aggressive, intransigent music with
song titles like “Close Ymr Eyes (And Count to
Fuck),” with bonkers-inspirational lines deliv-
ered in relentless crescendo that make you feel
like you could go outside and rip a tree right out
of the ground.

Aside from braggadocious self-canonization
and head-spinning cultural references, the duo’s
two albums. Run the Jewels and Run the Jewels
2 — along with Mike’s last solo effort, R.A.P. Mu-
sic, which El-P produced — are also vehicles for
powerful activist messages and political calls to
arms. On the song “Reagan,” Mike condemns the
fortieth president on a variety of points (“thanks

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but also his contemporaries: “We should be in-
dicted for bullshit we inciting / Hand the children
death and pretend that it’s exciting. ” On Run the
Jewels’ “Early,” he uses a harrowing first-person
narrative where a stop-and-frisk escalates into an
arrest and the narrator fears for his life. For his
part, Mike rejects the pohtical label, preferring
to call himself a “social commentator.”

As Mike’s fame has increased, he’s become a
reliable, eloquent representative in the public
forum. He spent a lot of 2015 speaking about
social issues in television appearances, at col-
leges, including MIT, and in pubhcations hke the
FADER and Billboard. He attended the White
House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, where
he says Arianna Huffington “whisked me around
the room like the socialite extraordinaire she
is.” In September, Run the Jewels was among
a handful of artists to play Banksy’s Dismal-
and, an art-exhibition-as-theme-park of sorts,
where Mike held one of Banksy’s original works
and cried, comparing the moment to that iconic
photo of Michael Jordan holding the NBA Fi-
nals trophy. When I asked liim if he thinks it’s
important to make the most of his time back in
the spotlight, if he feels a certain responsibility
to use his platform for good, he was adamant.

“Absolutely,” he said. “I don’t feel that all
rappers have that responsibility, but I feel like
1 have that responsibility. 1 used to work just
down the block. Come on.”

He walked me from the back room of the bar-
bershop and out onto Edgewood Avenue. Even
at 4 P.M. on a Thursday, the street and sidewalks
were bustling. He pointed into the distance.

“You see that big, square building?” he said.
“Just past the trees, that’s the United Way build-
ing right there. 1 used to be an organizer for this
city in there. HeUyeah, it’s important for me. I’m
stiU him. I just got lucky and I rap. But I am stiU
very much Michael Render. ”

RUTHIE FOSTER

APR. 7

JAY FARRAR BRIA SKONBERG

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K iller Mike wasn’t always as focused and
clearheaded as he is today. After the initial
success of liis collaborations with OutKast and
his debut album. Monster, which went gold in
2003 , Mike got lost down the usual avenues of
excess that accompany sudden fame. Not too long
ago, he’d nearly given up on rap altogether. His
musical output slowed, he and Shana opened
their first barbershop and Mike mainly kept to
himself. He played shows, but would go home
right after. He did some voice work for a short-
lived show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim
called Frisky Dingo, which led to an invitation

58 -

WINTER 2015

from Adult Swim VP Jason DeMarco for Mike
to contribute to Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon
Movie Film for Theaters Colon the Soundtrack,
It was DeMarco who would connect Mike and
El-P. When the latter produced Mike’s comeback
album, 2012’s JJ.A.P Mmszc, the veteran rappers
discovered and developed an artistic synergy (not
to mention a rather adorable best friendship) on
which Run the Jewels was founded.

The last few years have represented not just
a career pinnacle, but a welcome stability in his
personal life, too. “I treat my artistry better, I
treat myself better, I treat my wife better,” he
told me. “What matters now is longevity. I’m not
going out and buying brand new hot rods. I’m
not philandering around. I’m not buying silly,
gaudy, frivolous — whatever hip-hop is selling
that year. I’m pretty much Just a middle-class
dad and husband, and that’s fine. My sneakers
are doper than everyone else’s at the PTA meet-
ing, though.”

Meanwhile, Run the Jewels is preparing to
follow up on the runaway success of their first
two albums. Unsurprisingly, Mike is looking at
his next step as a challenge, expressing his goals
in the context of his heroes; “I don’t know if
you remember the time between ATLiens and

Aquemini, but ATLiensma.de you think OutKast
had gotten bigger than any of us ever thought
they could get,” he said. “Before they came with
Aquemini, it was like, ‘What the fuck could they
do? What could get better than this?’ And that’s
how I feel in my soul. I just wanna be dope over
decades, and I feel like I’m just getting credited
for being dope. Just now.”

I asked Mike if there’s anything more he
wants, anything he wishes he had. “I just feel
in my soul that we’ve got something bigger in
us,” he said. “It’s wild. I’m grateful, but I just
want it. I wanna rock stadiums. I believe the
rap I do is worthy of that. It’s like when you’re
a kid rapping or playing air guitar in front of a
mirror. Whatever you do, in your mind, you
see a stadium."

After moving the conversation outside, we
had stayed on Edgewood. Mike loves people,
and that comes through in all of his interactions,
whether he’s debating a talk show host, tweeting
at his fans, or talking to the young daughter of
one of his barbers. Of course, many people rec-
ognized him on the street. When a young man
approached us seeking counsel about rapping,
Killer Mike stopped. He hstened intently. And
he offered advice where he could, "if

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Art Rosenbaum
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59 -

o

Battle Cry
of the Android

BY

BRIT BENNETT

B lack people cannot time travel. Every
comedian has a joke about this.

On a July episode of the BuzzFeed

podcast Another Round, hosts Tracy Clayton
and Hehen Nigatu play a game that, they joke,
was clearly written by white people because of
the multitude of time travel questions. “Only
white people love time travel, ” Nigatu says. In
a standup hit, Louis C.K. calls time travel an
exclusively white privilege. “Here’s how great
it is to be white,” he says. “I can get in a time
machine and go to any time, and it would be
fucking awesome when I get there!” A recent
MTV Decoded sketch imagines that in a black
version of Back to the Future, the DeLorean
would never have left the mall parking lot.
“Nrneteen-fifty-five?” black Marty McFly asks.
“Tbu know what. Doc? I think I’m actually
good right here.”

I laugh at these jokes, although their prem-
ise is devastating: a vision of blackness where

suffering is continuous and inevitable. We can
imagine a fantastical world where time travel is
possible, yet we cannot conceive of any point in
the past, or even the future, where black people
can live free. In this line of thought, the present
is the best life has ever been for black people,
and perhaps the best it will ever be.

I nto this grim possibility arrives Janelle
Monae. Monae first captivated me in her 2010
video “Tightrope,” where, in the bleakness of
a notorious insane asylum, the tuxedoed and
pompadoured singer glides like James Brown
over funky horns. Although her sound and
image harken back to classic soul, her music
contains a mythology that looks toward the
future. Her EP Metropolis and albums The
ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady follow

GO -

WINTER 2015

“Hamba” (2012), from the series The Afronauts, by Cristina de Middel. Courtesy of Dillon gallery in New York

Cindi Mayweather, an android living in the
year 2719 who falls in love with a human and
is sentenced to disassembly. Cindi later rises
as the ArchAndroid, a messianic figure who
provides hope that androids may someday be
liberated. The sprawling, multi-project narra-
tive can be difficult to follow, but the futuristic
world she imagines echoes our own. “When I
speak about the android, it’s the other,” she
told LGBTQ newspaper Between the Lines. “You
can parallel that to the gay community, to the
black community, to women.” To Monae, the
android — part human, part robot, never fully
either — represents the outsider. To visit her
futuristic world of Metropolis is to encounter
characters who face discrimination, as well as
to imagine their liberation.

For interviews, Monae has frequently re-
mained in character as Cindi Mayweather,
visitor from the future. (When asked about her
sexuality in Rolling Stone, she refused to label
herself and insisted she only dates androids.)
In February 2015, she announced her new la-
bel, the Atlanta-based Wondaland Records,
which hosts a collection of eclectic black art-
ists who, like Monae, seem to exist outside of
time. At the Wondaland showcase during the
BET Experience, Monae described St. Beauty
as “flower children,” Roman GianArthur as
“another Freddie Mercury.” Her best-known
artist, Jidenna, dropped the hit single “Clas-
sic Man” earlier this year, but baffled audi-
ences with his three-piece suits, ascots, and
canes. To FADER, Jidenna explained that he
was inspired by the style of freedmen in the
Jim Crow South: “1 wear a suit because I need
to remember what’s happened before me.” In
Wondaland, style is radicalized, fashion a form
of political resistance.

What does it mean to borrow the fashions
of Reconstruction, an era in which no sensible
black person, given time-traveling technology,
would want to visit? Or to imagine a futuristic
world where an android faces bigotry similar
to our reality? Wondaland ’s music is melodic,
funky, and fun, as well as undeniably political.
At the showcase, Monae repeatedly referred
to her record label as a “movement” and spoke
about the responsibility she feels toward her
community. Similarly, Wondaland artists have
been outspoken critics of police brutality,
leading marches against police violence and,
in August, dropping the protest anthem “Hell
You Talmbout (Say Their Names).” Against
urgent drums and a choir of voices, Monae,
Jidenna, St. Beauty, Roman GianArthur, and
Deep Cotton chant the names of black victims

of police violence, from Emmett Till and Sean
Bell to Michael Brown and Sandra Bland. The
song is difficult to listen to, a seemingly end-
less list of names that the Wondaland artists —
voices strained with anger and grief — urge us
to remember. Say their names. The song is a
battle cry, and in a war against black suffering,
memory is the weapon.

In Wondaland, time travel is never an escape
from the plights of contemporary black life.

Instead, by floating through time, by play-
ing with the tropes of the past, by inventing
new mythologies and new futures, Monae and
her artists expand the possibilities of black art
and showcase the complexity of black lives, its
struggles and its triumphs. Wondaland artists
are in our time but not of it, and there’s some-
thing beautifully resistant about this. Black
people liberated from time itself, imagining
ourselves anywhere.

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62 -

“M-4150 ” by David Plunkert. Courtesy of the artist

NFINISHED

by Wyatt Williams

T here’s a story that Lance Ledbetter likes to tell about the his-
tory of barbecue in Atlanta. I’ve heard it several times. The
short version is that Atlanta’s pitmasters never bothered with
developing a local style because many travelers only wanted
barbecue that reminded them of home.

In the long version, Ledbetter seems to imagine himself
inside the details of the story. Tbu might try that, too. Let’s
say the year is 1 923 . The Atlanta Terminal Station is a massive
Beaux Arts beauty flanked by a pair of gdded towers. As a
train comes into the station, a horn blares and a cloud of white steam
floats from the locomotive. Passengers disembark and stream into the
lobby, their tickets punched from states all over, their hats cocked to
shade off the sun.

The weather is nice and money is good because the country is be-
tween wars and not yet into the Depression. People are walking fast.
They’re here on business with Sears-Roebuck, with General Motors,
with Atlanta Life. Among the crowd, a man is yelling. He’s trying to
get your attention. “Hey Carolina, we got your mustard sauce,” he’s
saying. “Hey Carolina, we got your hot vinegar. Hey Kansas City, we’ve
got those sweet ribs. Hey Texas, we got your brisket.” Ledbetter hkes
to tell that detail, his imitation of the barbecue barker.

Lance was born in 1976, four years after the Terminal Station was
demolished to make room for a parking lot. He doesn’t really know
what anyone hollered outside of barbecue joints a hundred years ago,
though the story makes a lot of sense. Historically, Atlanta isn’t thought
of as a place where things are from, aside from a bottle of Coke. It’s a
train town, a crossroads, a place where people and goods and ideas and
history pass through before finally arriving somewhere else. If you
ask Lance to talk about Atlanta, to try to explain it, he’ll probably tell
you that story about the barbecue. In his estimation, it explains Just
about everything.

W e were eating barbecue, in fact, when
Lance told me he’d given up on the
Georgia project.

He and his wife, April, and I were having
lunch at their house in the Ormewood Park
neighborhood of Atlanta, where they hve with
their two long-haired cats, Louie and Maybelle,
and where they run the Dust-to-Digital record
company, a small label that specializes in the
reissue of music old and obscure. It was summer
and the mood was lazy and casual. While dishes
of coleslaw, sliced peaches, white bread, and
smoky pork were passed around the table, the
conversation circled around, too. We gossiped
about other record labels, talked about Korean
food and where to get the best of it in Atlanta.
Some of Bill Ferris’s field recordings played on
the stereo. Eventually, 1 asked Lance if he was
ever going to make another masterpiece.

Of course, I didn’t say it like that. The word
makes people uncomfortable. But if you’ve made
a masterpiece, people generally expect you to
make another.

Twelve years ago, Dust-to-Digital released a
six-disc compilation box set of spiritual record-
ings from the first half of the twentieth century

called Goodbye, Babylon. The Ledbetters spent
four and a half years working on the project and
founded their record company for the purpose
of releasing it. The set was quickly recognized
as a classic. Sasha Frere-Jones described it as
“incomparable,” “the ark of the covenant.” It
was nominated for two Grammy s. Bob Dylan
gifted a copy to Neil Young, who called it “the
original wealth of our recorded music.” I asked
if they had any plans for something similar “in
size and scope.”

“When I finished Goodbye, Babylon, I had a few
projects on my desk, ” Lance said, pausing for a bite
of barbecue. “I wanted to make a CD of Christmas
music. I wanted to do a sacred harp set. I wanted
to recut Fred Ramsey’s Music of tbe South. And
I wanted to do a box set of music from Georgia.”
As Lance explained it, the Georgia project had
been as ambitious as Goodbye, Babylon. The other
projects were aU finished now, but Lance said, “I
think I’ve given up on Georgia. ” April put down
her fork and looked at him. She seemed surprised.

Lance and April have built their record com-
pany around a peculiar and bold musical vision.
They mostly rerelease old, unfashionable mu-
sic — the kind often known only to musicolo-
gists, university lecturers, and connoisseurs of
the obscure — and repackage it in a way that is

both easily accessible and artfully informed.
Since Goodbye, Babylon, the company has fo-
cused mostly on other people’s projects: Art
Rosenbaum’s field recordings, Jonathan Ward’s
collection of early African recordings, David
Murray’s Southeast Asian surveys, revisions of
Alan Lomax projects, long-lost John Fahey tapes.
These are not typical or chart-topping tunes, yet
Lance and April have done the seemingly impos-
sible, building the company into a solid business
during what might be one of the worst decades
for the record industry ever.

When Lance announced that he was giving
up, I was intrigued and confused. How could
his home state be more beguiling than, say, a
compilation of 78-rpm recordings from rural
Thailand? I asked Lance why he couldn’t see
the Georgia project through. He said he’d take
me down to the basement after lunch and show
me what went wrong.

T he Ledbetters moved into their house
a couple years after releasing Goodbye,
Babylon. Aside from a brief experiment
with office space, they have run the record label
from home ever since.

G4 -

WINTER 2015

Musicians in Atlanta, ca. 1915. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Dust-to-Digital and Todd Gladson

The house has recently been renovated and the
rooms are airy, full of natural light, and clean.
On the walls hang neatly framed artworks by Art
Rosenbaum and photographs by George Mitchell,
both iconic folklorists from Georgia and Dust-to-
Digital collaborators. In the living room, new built-
in shelves hold several hundred old records, some
oversized art books, and a polished, gold-plated
Gramophone trophy from 2008. Dust-to-Digital’s
releases are routinely nominated for the “Best His-
torical Album” category at the Grammy Awards, as
well as for lesser-known honors from organizations
like the Association for Recorded Sound Collections ,
the Living Blues Awards, the Society for Ethnomu-
sicology, and so on.

When I remarked to April that their shelves
seemed tidy, she disagreed. “Tbu can’t see what
1 see,” she said. “There’s no order over there, no
organization. We’U have to take care of that one day.”

If Lance is the visionary, the vigorously creative
and abstract brain of Dust-to-Digital, April is
the realist. They often work in the living room —
sometimes with a third collaborator, a collector or
a musicologist or an ambitious intern from Georgia
Tech — listening to recordings, making notes, and
talking through their projects. “Lance is constantly,
totally in his head to a point that you have to snap
him out of it sometimes,” she told me. “1 tend to be
more critical and say no to things and shut it down.
I think he looks to me for that.”

Lance and April met while attending Georgia
State University, where they both worked at the
university’s art-house theatre, selling popcorn
and movie tickets, loading the 35mm projector.
One thing led to another. It was during that time
that Lance started the research that would become
Goodbye, Babylon. “When he first mentioned that
he wanted to release gospel recordings, it was hard
for me to understand,” April said. “I had grown up
a Unitarian Universalist — we’re not known for our
singing.” Despite that, April insisted that she could
help with the project. They celebrated their ninth
wedding anniversary this year.

Neither Lance nor April thinks of themselves
as collectors. They often have occasion to work
with serious collectors, people who have acquired
enough recordings or objects or information that the
physical mass of it fills their homes and metaphori-
cally overflows their lives. The Ledbetters have
seen enough to know that they do not want that
for themselves, although that doesn’t mean they
don’t constantly buy records or find things that
they want to keep. Last year, they purchased the
contents of a storage unit with more than twenty
thousand records inside. They kept only a few and
flipped the rest. By their measure, this kind of
behavior means they are not collectors.

The Summer
Archivist

BY

A. E. STALLINGS

The summer that I turned nineteen
And felt grown-up in love,

1 took a job as an archivist
Sifting through a trove

Of photographic negatives
From old insurance claims
And portrait studios; a million
Faces sans the names.

The white tire-marks of mangled cars.
Rooms washed away with fire
Or crisp with flood, and then the odd
Event like the premiere

Of Gone with the Wind — we had to file
Each image we could see
Under person, place, or thing.

Were accidents all three?

Sometimes we sleeved stale evidence:

The body’s silhouette
Haloed on a motel floor
Near a lit cigarette.

And then there were the wedding shots.

1 catalogued each groom

Arrayed in tailored light, each gray-haired

Bride in weeds of gloom:

Her irises were milky, blind.

Her gaze was like a hole.

The roses in her hand were ash.

Her diamond ring was coal.

But these were just the revenants.

The brittle shades of love,

1 lifted like X-rays to the light
In a pale latex glove.

The summer I turned archivist
And filed the past away
For some frown-lined researcher
On some far winter day.

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The basement, however, is a different story
altogether. It’s roughly the same dimensions as
the Ledbetters’ kitchen and living room, but the
ceilings are low, there is only one window, and
the dim space is cramped with boxes and fdes and
ephemera and stacks of I’m not sure what — the
unmitigated clutter of running a record label for
the past decade. In the furthest, darkest corner is
a pile of the well-intentioned, absurd things that
most households accrue: tennis ball canisters,
yard maintenance equipment, family heirlooms
that have no function and yet cannot be thrown
away. Lance waded into that area looking for the
Georgia boxes.

I sat on a small chair near the window, close
to a laundry basket filled with handpicked raw
cotton, while he brought out the archives one
by one. There were two large cardboard boxes, a
lidded white box shaped for holding standard en-
velopes, and a couple of airtight plastic containers
that someone else might use for the transporta-
tion of a large casserole. Lance was about to open
one of the plastic containers when he changed
his mind, leaned over to a desktop computer, and
summoned up an old correspondence.

The email, dated April 2004, is addressed to
the music historian Tony Russell. Lance read
it aloud.

Hey Tony,

How are things? I saw where your discog-
raphy has been pushed back to summer.
As I’m sure many people feel, I can’t wait
for its release.

The reason I’m writing is because there has
been a bit of a change of plans for the next
big release on Dust-to-Digital. . . .

So what’s the project? It’s a box set of artists
from Georgia. The blueprint right now is
to approach the material by artists’ county
origin, but as you know things are always
subject to change. The good news is that my
preliminary research shows that this could
be quite possible.

Anyway, I have assembled a list of Georgia
artists and attached it to this message. If you
do not mind, I would very much appreci-
ate if you could take a look at it and offer
any suggestions/corrections. You’re also
invited to assist as much as you want in the
annotation phase. I know you’re busy, but
I just wanted you to know the invitation
is there. . . .

G6 -

WINTER 2015

I hope you are still enjoying your copy of

Goodbye, Babylon.

Kind regards,

Lance

Russell is one of the world s foremost experts on
old-time music, the big tent of Appalachian folk
musics that predate what we call country music
today. He founded the now-defunct magazine
Old Time Music in 1971. The discography that
Lance casually mentions at the beginning of the
email is Country Music Records, a 1,200-page
book that documents “every commercial country
music recording, including unreleased sides, and
indicates, as completely as possible, the musicians
playing at every session, as well as instrumenta-
tion” between the years 1921 and 1942. At the
time Lance emailed him, Russell had been working
on the discography for twenty years . Oxford Uni-
versity Press published it in September of 2004.

Russell was happy to oblige Lance s request.
'"Goodbye, Babylon signaled that there was an
enterprising and fresh-thinking new player in
the historical-reissue arena, ” he recently told me.
“I immediately realized that Lance was someone
with what seemed to me to be the right attitude to
the subject; fascinated, questioning, open-mind-
ed, dedicated. We became friends immediately.”

Russell lives in London, but he and Lance
quickly started collaborating on the Georgia set
by email. Their correspondence is enthusiastic
and obscure, full of excitement and praise for this
string band and that fiddle player, brimming with
long lists of names hke Doctor Clayton, South
Georgia Highballers, Sloppy Henry, Seven Foot
Dilly, and on and on.

Lance also wrote to Joe Bussard, perhaps the
best-known 78-rpm record collector in the world,
and asked for him to make a copy of every single
recording from Georgia in his collection. Like Rus-
sell, Bussard obliged. When the package finally
arrived, there were forty hours of music inside
and it reeked so heavily of cigar smoke, Bussard ’s
preferred vice, that Lance had to leave it outside to
air out before he could listen to the tapes.

The project was starting to loom large. “It was
Lance s idea, with which I agreed,” Russell told
me, “that the Georgia set — envisaged at that time
as maybe ten CDs — should include all the music
made in Georgia in the period under review: old-
time, blues, jazz, pop, gospel and sacred music,
and so forth.” Even for something so ambitiously
all-inclusive, there was the matter of where to
draw the borders. “We debated whether we
should include only commercial recordings or
also embrace field recordings made by folklor-

ists,” Russell said. “We also debated at what point
we should cut off. If we confined ourselves to
commercial recordings, would we stop with the
death of the 78 or cany on through the 45 era?”

* * *

D eciding when to chronologically begin
a project about the history of recorded
music in Georgia is actually quite simple.
On Thursday, June 14, 1923, an Okeh Records
engineer named Ralph Peer made the first record-
ings in Atlanta. One of the songs he cut, “The
Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” by Fiddlin’
John Carson, went on to sell nearly a hundred
thousand copies, convincing several New %rk
record companies of the financial viability of
traveling to Atlanta and other cities to record
Southern musicians. As sometimes happens with
moments in music history, almost every other
detail about that day in 1923 is a matter of debate.

The most-repeated version of the story be-
gins with Polk Brockman, an ambitious, young
Atlantan who ran the phonograph section of his
grandfather’s furniture store:

Brockman makes a name for himself with Okeh
Records by selling more units than any other re-
gional retailer, so the company invites him up to
New Tbrk for a meeting. On his way to the office,
Brockman ducks into a movie theater in Times
Square to watch the newsreels and sees a clip of
a fiddle competition in Virginia. The light bulb
goes on above his head — he decides to convince
the record company to come down to Atlanta
to record a fiddle player he knows. At the time,
record companies were shipping artists up north
to record, but none of them had thought to send
a record producer down to the South. Brockman’s
gambit works. Okeh sends Ralph Peer, who re-
cords Fiddlin’ John Carson in a vacant loft on
Nassau Street that Brockman rented out for the
occasion. Even though Peer thinks Carson is “plu-
perfect awful,” Okeh presses five hundred copies
of the record in time for a fiddle competition at the
Atlanta Municipal Auditorium in July. The record
sells out in a single day. History is made, the first
Southern music recorded in the South. Tbu might
could call it the birth of country music records.

That’s essentially the story that Archie Green
dug up for “Hillbilly Music,” a 1965 article for
the Journal of American Folklore. It is a stunning
and impressive bit of research, aside from the
fact that about half of those details are probably
wrong. According to Barry Mazor, whose biogra-
phy of Ralph Peer was pubhshed in 2014, Okeh’s
recording session in Atlanta was meant to focus on
Warner’s Seven Aces, a society band that played

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167 -

the Hght dance pop of the time, and it had been
planned weeks before the day when Brockman
could’ve seen that fiddle player on the newsreel.
Carson, Mazor claims, had been an afterthought,
and the recording took place on June 19 in a ware-
house on Nassau Street, not a vacant loft. As for
the “pluperfect awful” quote, the most famous
detail of Green’s story, Mazor attributes that to
something Brockman said in an interview decades
later in reference to Peer’s opinion of the recording
equipment. Peer probably never said it.

Green’s research concerned the origins of re-
corded country music, but what he actually de-
scribed is quite larger. The same recording session
in 1 923 that produced Fiddlin’ John Carson’s first
record also recorded blues singers Lucille Bogan
and Fannie Mae Goosby and the Morehouse
Gollege Quartet singing gospel tunes. So what
we’re talking about isn’t just the first country
music recording session in the South, but the
first blues record made in the South and the first
gospel record made in the South, too.

When 1 called Mazor about this, he said,
“When people write about the history of coun-
try music they leave out the blues and the other
way around. They keep it separate even though it
wasn’t. People create these imaginary separated

worlds, like these musicians were on different
planets, when in fact they were standing in the
same room, waiting to record their records one
after another.”

Histories tend to get shaped more like Green’s
version: the easy epiphany, the quotable punch
line, any tricky context sifted out. The most du-
rable stories tend to be the least complicated ver-
sions. If you ask about the birth of country music
records, you’re much more likely to hear about
a session in Tennessee in 1927, when the Carter
Family and Jimmie Rodgers first recorded. And if
you’re looking for the early days of blues, people
tend to point toward more mythical settings:
foggy crossroads, disappearing travelers. Mis-
sissippi’s crossroads and Nashville’s star-making
machine turned out to be durable stories. The
birth of Southern music in Atlanta doesn’t get
talked about the same way. Nobody has ever even
figured out which building on Nassau it happened
in. Today, the place is probably a parking lot.

W hile explaining all of this in his base-
ment, Lance had started to unpack box-
es. The speakers were tuned to songs

from the years following that first recording on
Nassau Street. Sloppy Henry’s “Canned Heat
Blues” floated around the room, moaning com-
plaints of unforgiving whiskey and alleyways.
Lance was trying to explain the chronology of
his work on the Georgia set, but the contents of
the boxes kept surprising him. He’d be talking
about a trip to Oregon that he and April took
to visit the researcher Norm Gohen, and then a
telegram from Ralph Peer would emerge from
one of the boxes, instructing some guy in 1928
to cheat Victor Records out of a contract with a
sacred quartet by using fake names.

“Look at this ! ” he’d say spontaneously. “This is
Clayton McMichen talking — this is an interview
that somebody did when he moved to Kentucky.
He’s one of the great Georgia artists. Oh, and look
at this, this is an oral history somebody did with
Riley Puckett. Look at all that. Where he was
born, where he died, all his children.”

He pulled out a stack of Columbia advertise-
ments and Okeh catalogs and it seemed hke every
other artist was from Georgia and recorded in
Atlanta. “At one point in time, we were the rep-
resentation of traditional music in the South,”
Lance said. “If you bought a country record in
1927, it was probably a Skillet Lickers or Fiddlin’

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South to teaig up with one of the South’s most
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campus events, and on-campus editorial offices.
The Oxford American and the University of
Central Arkansas work together to improve and
expand the arts with this unique partnership. It’s
a win-win for both in that the partnership creates
opportunities for UCA students while The Oxford
American continues its tradition of celebrating
fresh. Southern voices — putting both the arts and
UCA students front and center.

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John Carson record. If you bought a gospel record,
it s probably going to be a J. M. Gates. Those were
the ones selling.”

There were old photographs of young men and
women posing with their instruments, proud
and preening. There were stacks of typewritten
interviews, death certificates, radio programming
sheets. What Lance had been compiling was not
just a collection of songs, but a portrait of a time
in which Atlanta had been the thriving center
of recorded Southern music.

“For people who overlook or don’t understand
what Georgia music sounds like,” he said, “I
wanted to put it all together, so that you could
understand it. The originators of country and
twelve-string blues and gospel preaching on
record, they were all in these rooms at the same
time in Atlanta waiting to play one after another
after another after another. They were at house
parties on Hemphill. They were at the barbecue
restaurant on Ponce. They were at the furniture
store on Nassau.”

But the Atlanta recordings weren’t enough.
As Lance had said in his email to Tony Russell, he
wanted to create a collection that would contain
the whole geography of the state, county by
county if possible. Musicians were traveling into

Atlanta to record in the twenties, but they were
largely from the northern half of the state. There
had been one recording session in Savannah from
around that time, but that was it.

To cover all of Georgia, he kept extending
the years of focus, expanding the styles of re-
cording. He gathered field recordings and 45s
of jazz, quartet gospel, field work songs, the
Sea Island singers. Still, there wasn’t enough
to cover every county. Georgia has 1 59 of them
(only Texas has more), and many are tiny, ob-
scure, barely populated locales. Lance hadn’t
anticipated that.

The boxes had been carefully arranged, but
Lance couldn’t always remember what the ar-
rangement was. The files were meticulous. Just
looking at the neat stacks, the careful preserva-
tion, you could see the efforts of a hand trying
to keep something very big under control. As we
unpacked box after box, file after file, I could see
how things had gotten out of hand. There was
too much. Even with the necessary knowledge
required to make connections that hardly anyone
else would notice, connections that would bring
these documents to hfe, the information, the
history before us, all under the loose umbrella
of state lines —

Don ’tyour room seem lonesome when your
gal pack up and leave?

Don ’tyour room seem lonesome when your
gal pack up and leave?

You may drink your moonshine, but your
heart ain ’t never pleased.

That was Barbecue Bob interrupting us, re-
minding us to listen to the music, the tunes
coming out of the basement speakers — wasn’t
that really the point?

We listened to a commercialjingle, “I Got Your
Ice Cold NuGrape,” that somehow possesses
the warm depth of a gospel number. Then we
listened to a sermon by J. M. Gates admonish-
ing his parishioners, telling them to pay their
furniture bills. Then we heard Bobby Grant’s
“Lonesome Atlanta Blues,” a tune as lonesome
as it was eighty years ago. Gid Tanner and Riley
Puckett played “Tanner’s Boarding House,” a
dancing song with an off-kilter rhythm that
makes your head light like a shot of moonshine
would. Music, no matter how old, is always in
the present tense. It has the funny effect of tak-
ing you into a fully different moment for three
minutes at a time.

Lance calls his creative process “focused

AFTER YOU LISTEN TO THE MUSIC OF

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listening.” It isn’t anything like what we were
doing, hanging out, listening to songs and
talking. He sits with his eyes closed, computer
screen off, headphones on, and listens this way
for as long as he can, sometimes hours, making
notes on paper, forming cormections, looking
for the ways that music can explain itself. He
worked this way on the Georgia set for some
years, until he didn’t anymore.

T he short version of Lance and April Led-
better’s story is that they run a record com-
pany. This is true. They spend lots of time
acquiring legal rights, designing or approving
packaging, scheduling release dates, fulfilling
orders, coordinating with distributors, and all
of the other logistical tasks that tend to occupy
any other record label. Only, the things that
make Goodbye, Babylon great have little to do
with any of that.

It is a compilation of 135 songs and 25 ser-
mons recorded between the years 1902 and 1960.
Rather than organizing songs by genre or chro-
nology or geography or any other famihar rubric
of commercial music, the set is arranged by spirit
and mood, around concepts of “Judgment” or
“Dehverance” or “Salvation.” The hne that tends
to separate gospel and blues — that is to say, the
line between the sacred and profane — is obliter-
ated here, as is the hne between pretty much
any other form of American vernacular music.
To listen to all seven hours of it in one sitting is
to experience a new story of American music
told through the contours, the ecstatic highs
and sorrowful lows, of sermon. The compila-
tion is housed inside a cedar box packed with
balls of raw cotton, a design that says, “This is
important.”

The Ledbetters’ style belongs to an artistic
tradition that began with Harry Smith’s 1952
release Anthology of American Folk Music. The
music, recorded between 1926 and 1934, is
subtly organized by the classical elements of
water, fire, and air. Smith subscribed to some idea
of alchemy, the fundamental concept being that
certain materials could be combined to create a
sum greater than the parts. Base metals into gold.
Plain liquids into the elixir of life. Old forgotten
songs into a novel vision of American music. The
Antbology is, in a way, a template of that idea.

These creations are imaginary experiences,
shaped as much by the original recordings as
they are by the connections and idiosyncratic
knowledge of the curator. Essentially, that’s
the method of collage, the dominant art form of

72 -

WINTER 2015

the twentieth century. The trouble is that music
history tends to prefer oversimplified stories,
rubrics like genre or dates or race.

The Georgia set could have been the Led-
betters’ follow-up to Goodbye, Babylon, but,
of course, the Georgia set was never finished.
Lance and Tony Russell ended up collaborating
on other projects, smaller things that have since
been completed. The label has released other sets
arguably as good — their collection of Art Rosen-
baum’s field recordings received a Grammy — but
they are other people’s projects, other people’s life
works, not Lance and April’s. Neither of them
could say exactly why they couldn’t finish the
Georgia project. They tried to explain that there
were too many counties or that the concept got
too big or that it went on for too long and finally
lost momentum. Songs that had been obscure or
almost impossible to find started appearing on
YouTube, on Spotify, places that hadn’t even
existed when they started. Lance stopped seeing
it as a financially viable release. That’s when it
went into the boxes in the back of the basement.

Lance said that admitting he was finally giv-
ing up was a way of unburdening himself from
the whole thing. So many people had offered to
help, to give their own research that they wanted

someone else to use, their own collections that
they wanted someone else to hear. “There’s a
lot of people who have done incredible research
over the years that just don’t know what to do
with it,” Lance said. “People are burdened by
that, by having information but not having an
outlet to share it.”

Of course, it is entirely possible that the Geor-
gia set wouldn’t do much to shift the historical
record. No matter how well a story is told, there’s
no guarantee that people will listen to it. No mat-
ter the power and clarity of the music and history
that Lance had been able to compile, there’s no
guarantee that it would’ve been anything but
another box full of CDs in the Dust-to-Digital
basement, waiting to be packed away for the slow
trickle of mail order.

That isn’t a very optimistic version of the story.
Russell told me that he still hoped they could
finish it one day. “Between 1923 and 1932, a
greater number of first-rate blues, gospel, and old-
time music recordings was made in Atlanta than
anywhere else,” he said. “This could be a set that
blazoned to the world Georgia’s vast contribution
to American vernacular music. In my view, the
door should be kept open for such a possibility. ”
Perhaps the Georgia set could have been a revision

to the slights of history, a new genesis story for
the whole Southern music universe.

It was getting late in the basement. Lance and
I had been talking for hours and the conversation
had finally gone quiet. We were looking at a
photograph of a couple dozen men holding
fiddles and banjos, maybe standing outside
the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium, maybe
somewhere else. The picture must have been
taken sometime in the twenties, or earher. The
men wear suits and ties, their hats cocked coolly
to the side. They have thousand-mile stares.
Maybe they had train tickets in their pockets,
maybe they had arrived that day. Lance pointed
to Fiddlin’ John Carson. It wasn’t hard to pick
out the guy they called Seven Foot Dilly. The
other men had names, of course, but they might
be lost to history by now. Lance said the picture
had never been published anywhere, probably
hadn’t been seen by much of anyone since it was
taken. He was looking at it intently. He seemed to
be able to see it more clearly than I could. Maybe
he could imagine himself inside the scene. We
were still listening to that old Atlanta music.
The past seemed awfully present.

That’s when Lance looked at me and said, “I
don’t want to say it will never happen.”

-Join Us -

★ ★★ HELP WRITE OUR STORY ★★★

Were forming a community of Oxford American enthusiasts who share our goal of
exploring and celebrating the complexity of the South through literature, art, and music.
To join the Oxford American Society and receive the discounts, access, and benefits of
membership, visit oxfordamerican.org/members or call 501-374-0000.

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173 -

(9 pot
9TiaAyyl^ ^Ayp^:

CARNIVAL SEASON JANUARY 9 - FEBRUARY 14

/

MAKE YOUR RESERVATIONS TODAY!

Throw Me Something, Mister!
Here are just a few of our
"don't miss" parades.

KREWE OF MONA LISA
& MOONPIE

Walking Parade, Slidell

Saturday, Jan. 23 at 7 p.m.

KREWE OF EVE

Traditional Parade, Mandeville

Friday, Jan. 29 at 7 p.m.

If you're looking for a tamer version
of New Orleans, you'll find it just 45
minutes from the French Quarter.
St. Tammany Parish, aka "Louisiana's
Northshore," is full of family-friendly
Mardi Gras parades. Our celebrations
are quirky, unforgettable, and full
of safe, small-town positive energy.
And whether we're parading our
poodles, floats, boats, or lawnmowers,
Northshore Krewes throw a lot of loot!

The Northshore's maritime history
is honored with Krewe of Bilge in
Slidell and the Krewe of Tchefuncte
in Madisonville. As parading boats
navigate the waterways, their fun-

loving Krewes toss beads, doubloons,
and trinkets to throngs of parade-
goers waving from the banks.

Children love catching beads and
petting the Northshore's pooches on
parade at the Krewe de Paws in Slidell
and the Mystic Krewe of Mardi Paws
in Mandeville.

The hilarious Krewe of Push Mow
decorates dozens of humorously
themed homemade floats, many
based on lawn equipment, for a funky
and rousing cruise through the heart
of Abita Springs.

The Northshore Krewes of Eve,
Olympia, Selene, and Dionysis offer
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Photos courtesy of Bill Lang

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KREWE OF PUSH MOW

Quirky Lawn Equipment Parade,
Abita Springs

Saturday, Jan. 30 at 11 a.m.

KREWE OF OLYMPIA

Traditional Parade, Covington

Saturday, Jan. 30 at 6 p.m.

KREWE OF TCHEFUNCTE

Boat Parade, Madisonville

Saturday, Feb. 6 at 1 p.m.

MYSTIC KREWE OF
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Pooch Parade, Mandeville

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Music Credits

T he Oxford American Georgia Music Issue CD was compiled and produced by Maxwell
George and the editors of the Oxford American, and mastered by Grammy Award-winning
engineer Michael Graves of Osiris Studio in Atlanta, Georgia.

This project would not have been possible without the huge generosity of the creators and
rights holders of these songs. We credit and thank them here. If you like what you hear, we
encourage you to seek out more of the music at its source.

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation.

(1): Publication Title Oxford American. (2.) Publication Number 025-157
(5.) Filing Date: 9/18/2015. (4.) Issue Frequency: quarterly. (5.) Number of
Issues Published Annually: 4. (6.) Annual Subscription Price: J24.98. (7.)
Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 201 Donaghey
Ave. Conway, AR 72055. Contact person: Ray Wittenberg. Telephone:
501-574-0000. (8.) Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General
Business Office of Publisher: Oxford American., POB 5255, Little Rock,
AR 72205-5255. (9.) Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of
Publisher. Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Ray Wittenberg, POB
5255, Little Rock, AR 72205-5255. Editor: Eliza Borne, POB 5255, Little
Rock, AR 72205-5255. Managing Editor: Maxwell George POB 5255, Little
Rock, AR 72205-5255. (10.) Owner: The Oxford American Literary Project,
Inc. POB 5255. Little Rock. AR 72205-5255. (12.) Tax Status: The purpose,
function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt
status for federal income tax purposes: status has not changed during
preceding 12 Months. (15.) Publication title: Oxford American. (14.) Issue
date for circulation data: 09/15/2015. Extent and Nature of Circulation
(15a) Total Number of Copies (net press run): Average number of copies
each issue during preceding 12 months: 55,175. Number copies of single
issue published nearest to filing date: 24,000. (15b) Paid circulation by
mail and outside the mail: (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions
Stated on PS Form 5541. Average number of copies each issue during
preceding 12 months: 15,127. Number copies of single issue published
nearest to filing date: 15,518. (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions
Stated on PS Form 5541: Average number of copies each issue during
preceding 12 months: 0. Number copies of single issue published nearest
to filing date: 0. (5) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including
Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales,
and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: Average number of copies
each issue during preceding 12 months: 5,749. Number copies of single
issue published nearest to filing date: 2,082. (4) Paid Circulation by
Other Classes Mailed Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail) Average
number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number
copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (15c) Total Paid
Distribution: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12
months: 18,876. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing
date: 15,400. (D)Free or Nominal Rate Distribution by mail and outside
the mail: (1) Free or nominal rate outside county copies included on
PS Form 5541: Average number of copies each issue during preceding
12 months: 484. Number copies of single issue published nearest to
filing date: 469. (2)Free or nominal rate in-county copies included on
PS Form 5541: Average number of copies each issue during preceding
12 months: 0. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing
date: 0. (5) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through
the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail) Average number of copies each issue
during preceding 12 months: 0. Number copies of single issue published
nearest to filing date: 0. (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside
the Mail (Carriers of other means): Average number of copies each
issue during preceding 12 months: 2,065. Number copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 1,667. (E) Total Free or Nominal Rate
Distribution: Average number of copies each issue during preceding
12 months: 2,549. Number copies of single issue published nearest to
filing date: 2,156. (F) Total Distribution: Average number of copies each
issue during preceding 12 months: 21,425. Number copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 17,556. (15g) Copies not Distributed:
Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,764.
Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 5,558.
(15h) Total: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12
months: 50,189. Number copies of single issue published nearest to
filing date: 22,894. (15i): Percent Paid: Average number of copies each
issue during preceding 12 months: 88%. Number copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 88%. (16a) Paid electronic copies:
Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 1,517.
Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,114.
(16b) Total paid print copies + paid electronic copies: Average number
of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 20,195. Number of
copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 16,514. (16c) Total
print distribution + paid electronic copies: Average number of copies
each issue during preceding 12 months: 22,885. Number of copies of
single issue published nearest to filing date: 18,650. (16d) Percent paid
(both print and electronic copies): Average number of copies each issue
during preceding 12 months: 88%. Number of copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 88%. 17. Publication of Statement of
Ownership will be printed in the Winter 2015 issue.

1. "Cold Sweat (False Start)" James Brown ■ Written by;
James Brown, Alfred Ellis • Credited Musicians: Joe Du-
pars, Waymon Reed (trumpets); Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (alto
saxophone); Alphonso "Country" Kellum, Jimmy Nolen (gui-
tar); Bernard Odum (bass); Maceo Parker, Etdee Williams
(tenor saxophone); St. Clair Pinckney (baritone saxophone);
Levi Rasbury (valve trombone); Clyde Stubblefield (drums)
■ From: Foundations of Funk {Po\^6or 1996); Recorded May
1967 • Publisher: Warner/Chappell Music • Courtesy of: Uni-
versal Music Enterprises, a division of UMG Recordings,
Inc. • Special thanks: Deanna Brown Thomas, Peter After-
man, Tricia Tierno, Teresa Hale, Nicholas LaPointe

2. "Watch the Dog That Bring the Bone" Sandy Gaye ■ Writ-
ten by: Richard Marks, Bill Wright • Credited Musicians:
Sandy Gaye (vocals); Richard Marks (guitar); Bill Wright
(keyboards); with unidentified accompaniment • From: Ec-
centric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels (Numero Group
2008); Originally released as a 45 on Tragar Records (1969) ■
Publisher: Dust Index (BMI) • Courtesy of: Numero Group ■
Special thanks: Jon Kirby, Rob Sevier

3. "Ohoopee River Bottomland" Larry Jon Wilson ■ Written
by: Larry Jon Wilson • Credited Musicians: Randy Cullers

(drums); Terry Dearmore (bass, harmonica); Steve Hostak
(electric guitar); Larry Jon Wilson (acoustic guitar, vocals)

• From: Recorded in December 1975 for the film Heartworn
Highways (1976) • Publisher: Combine Music Corp., admin-
istered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing • Courtesy of: SeaLion
Films ■ Special thanks: Graham Leader, Evan Krauss, David
Gorman, Matt Sullivan, Todd Ellis, Valarie Kane, Sam Sweet

4. "Brass Buttons" Gram Parsons ■ Written by; Gram Par-
sons ■ Credited Musicians: James Burton (electric lead
guitar); Emory Gordy (bass); Glen D. Hardin (electric piano);
Gram Parsons (acoustic guitar, vocals); Al Perkins (pedal
steel guitar); Ronnie Tutt (drums) • From: Grievous Angel
(Reprise Records 1974) ■ Publisher: BMG Platinum Songs
(BMI) / R2M Music (BMI) / Songs of Lastrada (BMI) ■ Cour-
tesy of: Warner Music Group • Special thanks: Michael
Steinkohl, Kimberly Cozzens, Evan Shafferman

5. "See See Rider Blues" Ma Rainey & Her Georgia Jazz Band
■ Written by: Ma Rainey • Credited Musicians: Louis Armstrong
(cornet); Buster Bailey (clarinet); Charlie Dixon (banjo); Char-
lie Green (trombone); Fletcher Henderson (piano); Ma Rainey
(vocals) ■ From: Paramount 12252-B (1925) 78-rpm record
from the collection of Music Memory, Inc. Transfer made

Record sleeve courtesy of Brian Poust

OxfordAmerican.org

175 -

with technical support by and under the auspices of Music
Memory, Inc. For more Information, visit www.musicmemory.
org ■ Publisher: Universal Music Corp. • Courtesy of: GHB Jazz
Foundation • Special thanks: Lars Edegran, Lance Ledbetter,
Michael Graves, Cody Schnieders, Jordan Lowy

6. "Georgia Buck" Precious 6/yanf- Written by: Traditional, ar-
ranged by Precious Bryant • Credited Musicians: Precious Bry-
ant (guitar) • From: Recorded in Talbotton, Georgia, for the film
Sing My Troubles (2010) • Courtesy of: Neil Rosenbaum ■ Spe-
cial thanks: Neil Rosenbaum, Art Rosenbaum, Lance Ledbetter

7. "Raggy Levy" Jake Xerxes Fussell y\lr\tten by: Traditional,
arranged by Jake Xerxes Fussell • Credited Musicians: Jake
Xerxes Fussell (guitar, vocals); Brian Kotzur (percussion):
Chris Scruggs (bass, mandolin, steel guitar); William Ty-
ler (guitar, organ) • From: Jake Xerxes Fusse// (Paradise of
Bachelors 2015) • Courtesy of: Paradise of Bachelors • Spe-
cial thanks: Jake Fussell, Brendan Greaves

8. "Untitled" Killer Mike feat. Scar ■ Written by: Jamie Me-
lina, Michael Render • Credited Musicians: Ei-P (producer):
Killer Mike (lead vocal); Scar (vocals) • From: R.A.R Music
(Williams Street 2013) ■ Publisher: Pulse Publishing Admin-
istration o/b/o Definitive Jux (SESAC); The Royalty Network
Inc. o/b/o Aniyah's Music • Courtesy of: Adult Swim & Car-
toon Network Enterprises, Inc. • Special thanks: Will Bron-
son, Brenton Hund, Frank Liwall, Amaechi Uzoigwe

9. "I Want the Lord to Do Something for Me" Evangelist Hat-
tie Finney & Straight Street Holiness Church Choir ■ Written
by: Traditional, arranged by Milton Phelps & Hattie Finney

■ Credited Musicians: Evangelist Hattie Finney (lead vocals,
drums); Rev. Milton Phelps (guitar, vocals); Straight Street
Holiness Church Choir (chorus) • From: Self-released 45 (ca.
1974) • Courtesy of: Jeannette Finney ■ Special thanks: Lance
Ledbetter, Bradford Cox, Jeannette Finney, Robert Evans

10. "Sweet Picking Time in Toomsboro, Ga." Tut Tayor with
Norman Blake ■ Written by: Robert Arthur Taylor • Credited
Musicians: Norman Blake (guitar); Tut Taylor (Dobro) • From:
Friar Tuf (Rounder 1978) • Publisher: Tutwiler Music • Courte-
sy of: Concord Music Group, Inc. • Special thanks: Wolfgang
Frank, Nicole Leigh, David E. Taylor

11. "Ain't No Chimneys in the Projects" Sharon Jones & the
Dap-Kings ■ Written by: Sharon Jones, Bosco Mann • Credited
Musicians: Binky Griptite (guitar); Dave Guy (trumpet); Sharon
Jones (lead vocal); Bosco Mann (bass); Homer Steinweiss
(drums): Neal Sugarman (tenor saxophone); Fernando Velez
(congas, tambourine); Saun & Starr (vocals) ■ From: It’s a Holi-
day Soul Party (Daptone 2015); Originally released as a 45 on
Daptone Records (2009) • Publisher: Defend Music, Inc. • Cour-
tesy of: Daptone Records • Special thanks: Hampton Howerton,
Sharon Jones, Athena Roscoe, Nea! Sugarman

12. "The Living Bubba" (live) Drive-By Truckers ■ Written by:
Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers • Credited Musicians:
Mike Cooley (guitar, vocals); Jay Gonzalez (keyboards); Pat-
terson Hood (vocals, guitar); Brad Morgan (drums); Matt
Patton (bass) ■ From: It's Greatto Be Alive! (ATO 2015) ■ Pub-
lisher: Pottery Town Music (BMI) • Courtesy of: ATO Records

■ Special thanks: Patterson Hood, David Barbe, Mike Quinn,
Christine Strauder, Jon Salter

13. "Awake" Smoke ■ Written by: Smoke ■ Credited Musicians:
Benjamin (vocals); Tim Campion (drums); Brian Halloran (cel-
lo); Coleman Lewis (guitar); Bill Taft (cornet) • From: Heaven on
a Popsicle Stick {long Play 1994) ■ Courtesy of: Brian Halloran •
Special thanks: Brian Halloran, Matt Sullivan, Bill Taft

14. "The Winter Is Coming" Elf Power ■ Written by; Andrew
Rieger • Credited Musicians: Laura Carter (keyboards); Adrian
Finch (violin); Bryan Poole (guitar); Andrew Rieger (vocals,
guitar); Scott Spillane (horns) ■ From: The Winter Is Coming
(Orange Twin 2001) ■ Publisher: BMG Bumblebee (BMI)/ Ampu-
tated Songs (BMI) • Courtesy of: Orange Twin Records • Special
thanks: Laura Carter, Andrew Rieger, Michael Steinkohl

15. "Tried to Be True" Indigo Girls ■ Written by: Amy Ray,
Emily Saliers ■ Credited Musicians: Bill Berry (drums); Pe-
ter Buck (electric guitar); John Keane (shaker); Mike Mills
(bass); Amy Ray (lead vocals, guitar); Emily Saliers (vocals,
lead guitar) ■ From: Indigo Girls (Epic 1989) • Publisher: God-
hap Music • Courtesy of: Sony Music Entertainment • Special
thanks: Evan Carter, Russell Carter, Traci Werbel, Katie Pani-
cali, Cody Schnieders, Jordan Lowy

16. "Potter's Field" Alice Swoboda ■ Written by: Alice Swoboda

• Credited Musicians: Alice Swoboda (vocals, acoustic guitar)
with unidentified accompaniment • From; Eccentric Soul: The
Tragar& Note /.a/?e/s(2008); Originally released as a 45 on Note
Records (1972) ■ Publisher: Dust Index (BMI) ■ Label: Numero
Group • Special thanks: Jon Kirby, Rob Sevier, Alice Swoboda

17. "Diamond Joe" Bessie Jones - Written by: Traditional, ar-
ranged by Bessie Jones ' Credited Musicians: Bessie Jones
(vocal) • From; The Alan Lomax Collection at the American
Folklife Center, Library of Congress • Publisher: Odyssey
Productions d/b/a Global Jukebox Publishing • Courtesy of:
The Association for Cultural Equity • Special thanks: Nathan
Salsburg

18. "As Bad as I Am" Ruby the RabbitFoot- Written by: Ruby
Gail Kendrick ■ Credited Musicians: Frank Kieth IV (bass);
Ruby the RabbitFoot (vocals, guitar, piano); Nate Nelson
(keyboards, drums) • From: New as /7ew(Normaltown 2014)

• Publisher; Rhinestone World • Courtesy of: Normaltown
Records • Special thanks: George Fontaine Jr., David Barbe,
Ruby Gail Kendrick

19. "I've Got Dreams to Remember (Rougher Dreams)" Otis
Redding ■ Written by: Otis Redding, Zelma Redding, Joe
Rock • Credited Musicians; Steve Cropper (guitar); Donald
"Duck" Dunn (bass); Isaac Hayes (keyboards); Al Jackson
Jr. (drums); Booker T. Jones (organ); Otis Redding (vocals) •
From: Lonely & Blue: The Deepest Soul of Otis Redding (Stax
2013); Recorded May 1967 ■ Publisher: Irving Music, Inc. ■
Courtesy of: Concord Music Group, Inc. • Special thanks:
Wolfgang Frank, Nicole Leigh, Karla Redding, Kenny Nemes,
Cody Schnieders, Jordan Lowy

20. "Aquemini" OutKast ■ Written by: Andre Benjamin, Ant-
wan Patton • Credited Musicians: Andre 3000, Big Boi (vo-
cals); with Victor Alexander (drums); Preston Crump (bass);
Earthtone (horns, arranging); Darian Emory (horns); Jerry
Freeman, Jr. (horns); Ahjahne Green (additional vocals);
Craig Love (guitar); Rico Lumpkin (mixing); Sonja Mickey
(additional vocals); Mr. DJ (scratches); Omar Phillips (per-

cussion) • From: Aquemini (LaFace 1998) • Publisher; BMG
Monarch (ASCAP) / Gnat Booty Music • Courtesy of: Sony
Music Entertainment • Special thanks: Andre Benjamin,
Antwan Patton, Eufaula Garrett, La-Shea Conyers, Michael
Steinkohl, Kimberly Cozzens, Traci Werbel, Katie Panicali

21. "Lonesome Atlanta Blues" Bobby Grant ■ Written by:
Bobby Grant • Credited Musicians: Bobby Grant (vocals,
guitar) • From; Paramount 12595-B (1927) 78-rpm record
from the collection of Music Memory, Inc. Transfer made
with technical support by and under the auspices of Music
Memory, Inc. For more information, visit www.musicmemory.
org • Courtesy of: GHB Jazz Foundation ■ Special thanks: Lars
Edegran, Lance Ledbetter, Michael Graves

22. "Recent Title" Pylon ■ Written by: Randall Bewley, Curtis
Crowe, Michael Lachowski, Vanessa Hay • Credited Musicians;
Randall Bewley (guitar); Vanessa Hay (vocals); Curtis Crowe
(drums); Michael Lachowski (bass) • From: Gyrate Plus (DFA
2007); Recorded in 1980 ■ Publisher: BMG Bumblebee (BMI) /
Pylon Music Two • Courtesy of; DFA Records • Special thanks:
Michael Lachowski, Vanessa Briscoe Hay, Jonathan Galkin

23. "Midnight H'\6er" Allman Brothers Band ■ Written by: Joe
Ely ■ Credited Musicians: Duane Allman (guitar, vocals); Gregg
Allman (vocals, guitar); Dickey Betts (guitar, vocals); Jai Jo-
hanny "Jaimoe" Johanson (drums); Berry Oakley (bass); Butch
Trucks (drums) • From: Idlewild South (Capricorn 1970) ■ Pub-
lisher: GA Songs, LLC d/b/a Elijah Blues Music; Warner/Chap-
pell Music • Courtesy of; Universal Music Enterprises • Special
thanks: Nicholas LaPointe, Michael Lehman, Jerry Butler, Tricia
Tlerno, Teresa Hale

24. "Midnight" Futurebirds ■ Written by: Boudleaux Bryant,
Chet Atkins • Credited Musicians: Thomas Johnson (wurly,
vocals, percussion, guitar); Carter King (guitars, vocals);
Daniel Womack (acoustic guitar); Brannen Miles (bass);
Johnny Lundock (drums); Dennis Love (pedal steel); with
Marcus Tenney (trumpets, saxophone) • From: Recorded
especially for the Oxford American on October 12, 2015, at
Montrose Recording in Richmond, Virginia (Engineered by
Bruce & Adrian Olsen; Mixed by Adrian Olsen) ■ Publisher:
Sony/ATV • Courtesy of: Easy Sound Records • Special
thanks: Todd Ellis, Thomas Johnson and Futurebirds, Mon-
trose Recording, Kevin Monty, David Barbe

25. "Moon River" (1961 demo) Henry Mancini & Johnny Mer-
cer ■ Written by: Henry Mancini, Johnny Mercer • Credited
Musicians; Henry Mancini (piano); Johnny Mercer (vocals)
■ From: Unreleased demo recording • Publisher: Sony/ATV ■
Courtesy of: Chris Mancini ■ Special thanks: Chris Mancini,
Felice Mancini, Lisa Love, Todd Ellis, Michael Graves

We are grateful to all our readers and donors for
supporting this project. The following donors
pledged at least $100 to support our Georgia
Music issue: Susan Borne, Susan Elder, David
Hagen, Stephanie Howard, David Krause, Scott
Parven, and Nadyne Richmond. New members
of the Oxford American Society are Walker Ma-
son Beauchamp, Matthew F. Grinnell, and Bill
St. John, "if

76 -

WINTER 2015

MAY 27/28/29

The Music of
Elton John

starring Michael
Cavanaugh

Atlanta

Symphony

Orchestra

JAN 21/23

Thu/Sat: 8pm

BEETHOVEN:

Missa solemnis

Donald Runnicles,
conductor
Kim-Lillian Strebel,
soprano

Stephanie Lauricella,
mezzo-soprano
Shawn Mathey,
tenor

Marko Mimica,
bass

ASO Chorus

Robert Shaw Legacy
CELEBRATION

There was only one Robert Shaw. A giant of the 20th century
musical scene, Shaw built the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
and Chorus into the world renowned institution it is today.

Join us for one or all of these celebrated musical events in
Atlanta Symphony Hall as we celebrate what would have
been Maestro Shaw’s 100th birthday.

MAR 10/12

Thu/Sat: 8pm

A SHAW CHORAL
CELEBRATION

VERDI: Stabat Mater
POULENC: Gloria in
Excelsis Deo
BRAHMS: Nanie
DURUFLE: Requiem,
“Sanctus”

AND MUCH MORE!
Norman Mackenzie,
conductor

ASO Chamber Chorus
ASO Chorus

APR 14/16

Thu/Sat: 8pm

BRAHMS:

A German Requiem
JONATHAN LESHNOFF:
Zohar

WORLD PREMIERE
Robert Spano,
conductor
Jessica Rivera,
soprano
Nmon Eord,
baritone
ASO Chorus

JUN9/U
Thu/Sat: 8pm
ROBERT SHAW
FAVORITES

BRAHMS: ^

Piano Concerto No. 2
BRAHMS: 0

Symphony No. 2 Q

Robert Spano,
conductor
Andre Watts,
piano

Presented by:

A DE LTA

Tickets: aSO.Org

A DE LTA

Atlanta

Symphony

Orchestra

" Experience the music you love!

MAR 18/19

TAPESIRY

THE

CAROLE KING

ets:

aso.org

SONG

BOOK

MAY 13/14/15 Presented by: DELTA

acouttic.daduai lo.com

o Classic

o Balanced

o Consistent

o Authentic

o Original

o True